Sleep with Slander

  SLEEP WITH SLANDER

  DOLORES HITCHENS

  LIBRARY OF AMERICA E-BOOK CLASSICS

  Copyright © 1960 by Dolores Hitchens, renewed 1988 by Patricia Johnson and Michael J. Hitchens. Used by permission of the Estate of Dolores Hitchens.

  Published by The Library of America,

  14 East 60th Street, New York, NY 10022.

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  eISBN 978–1–59853–488–7

  CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Biographical Note

  HE TURNED tiptoeing from the refrigerator, the bottle of milk cold and slippery in his grasp. The little light shone out upon the dark floor, painted the long shadow of his legs against the kitchen wall. He moved with watchful care toward the table, but then he heard a sudden noise, and started, and the bottle fell rolling, with milk spreading like a ghostly lake.

  He waited trembling, a hand over his mouth. A shadow came in at the door, and he whimpered. A shape in a wrapper loomed over him; hands gripped his shoulders and the shaking started, so hard that it seemed his head must snap from his neck, and his senses swam.

  “You brat! You dirty horrible little brat!”

  One hand lifted from his shoulder and the slapping began. He tried to crouch, to protect his head. All of his insides knotted and drew small, his body trying to curl itself into the fetal cocoon. But he was yanked straight, a hand gripping his hair. The screams he had tried to contain burst free.

  He fell, and something kicked him. The spilled milk felt cold and clammy in his clothes. He was dragged through it, knowing where he was headed now, begging not to be put there.

  The musty closed-in smell reached out for him, and he tried to brace his legs at the sill; but this was useless. He was flung in and the closet door was slammed, the key turned. He was alone and it was very dark.

  After a while, when there were no more tears, he felt around for the folded bit of carpet, crawled upon it and curled himself, and shut his eyes. He sucked his thumb for a while, and finally went to sleep. There were coats on the rack above, and he was cold, but he had no thought of covering with them. They belonged to the others.

  The house creaked and whispered to itself, and the night wore away. When it was almost dawn there were soft steps in the hall outside the closet door, and a sharp, listening silence. The boy in the closet was unaware, far gone in dreams. When he awoke there would be again hunger, and the strange implacable anger that waited like a toying cat, and blows, and the unbelief with which he regarded his five-year-old world.

  But for this moment, there was peace.

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE SIGN on the door that let into the corridor said SADER AND SCARBOROUGH, PRIVATE DETECTIVES.

  Sader was in the inner office looking over some glossy photos of an automobile accident and its victims. He stood behind his desk, the photos laid out on it; he was a little stooped in posture, taking something from his height. He was smoking a cigarette. He was a lean man with hair that had once been red and now had grayed to rust, with intelligent eyes and an air of patience. When the bell pealed in the outer room he crushed the cigarette into an abalone-shell tray and went to answer. On his way he glanced at the clock. It was not quite nine-thirty, a misty morning in October, with dark skies threatening to rain.

  He opened the door. In the hall was a man in a weatherproof overcoat, muffler, brown felt hat, overshoes. He was about sixty, Sader thought. He had a snow-white mustache and eyes like two steel rivets. “You’re the detective?” he demanded, in Sader’s opinion rather louder than necessary. “Are you any good?”

  “I’m busy,” Sader said, losing the air of patience.

  “Busy?”

  “My partner’s on vacation and I have about all the work I can handle.”

  “Made you mad.” The pale lips parted in a grin. The dentist had fitted him with small, even teeth and in the rugged face they were ridiculous. “Makes you mad for someone to want to know if you’re any good?”

  Sader controlled what he wanted to say, stepped back. “Come in, please.”

  The old man paused in the outer office, reached under the overcoat and got out a wallet, extracted a business card and handed it to Sader. The card read:

  FRIMM, WATLEY AND STONE

  ARCHITECTS

  4900 Wilshire Boulevard    Los Angeles, California

  Sader read the card and looked up. “You’re Mr. Frimm?”

  “I’m not any of them. They’re all dead. Started the firm in L.A. in eighteen seventy. My name is Gibbings. Hale Gibbings.”

  “You are an architect?”

  “Senior partner now.” Gibbings was looking around at the outer room, which was empty except for a water cooler and some filing cabinets. “Do we talk here or can we sit down?”

  “We can sit down.” Sader ushered him into the other office. Two big desks were placed back to back, there were several chairs and a thick rug and a leather couch. Sader quickly shuffled the accident photos into a stack and dropped them into a drawer. He placed Gibbings’ card in the exact center of the desk. Gibbings was seated on the couch. “Now. What can I do for you?”

  The old man opened the overcoat and stretched his legs—as if, Sader thought, the joints might be just a little rheumatic. He was staring at Sader with the steel-rivet eyes, no humor in his face. “How good are you, really? No, don’t get sore! I guess I should have said, what kind of an operator are you? I’ve got to have a certain kind of man. A certain touch. I need a weasel, an opportunist, somebody with the mind of a shakedown artist. A corner-cutter. Even . . . you might say . . . a kind of pimp.”

  Sader felt himself stiffen, and he was aware of a faint apprehension. Gibbings looked as cool as a floating hawk, but Sader didn’t like this beginning and he wondered if he should ask him to leave before anything more was said.

  “You look like you’ve been around.” Gibbings had taken out a pipe and was fussing with it. “At the same time that I need all these things,” he went on as if continuing his previous specification, “I need most of all an honest man. Yes . . . a kind of crook, and yet honest.” He got a match lighted; it flared between his fingers. “Do you see what I mean?”

  “I’m afraid not, no, sir.”

&n
bsp; “How much of a—” He waved the pipe as if including Sader with the office furnishings. “—of a code, or ethics, or standard of behavior do you have to keep to, in these places? Do you have to account to anyone for what you do? Some licensing committee?”

  “Some private detectives get away with quite a bit, for quite a while,” Sader said. “I guess it depends on the individual. We are licensed by the state and we are expected to co-operate with other law-enforcement bodies. Does that answer your question?”

  “What about you? How do you run things?”

  “We don’t ordinarily do divorce work,” Sader told him. This didn’t seem to make the difference he had expected. “We do a lot of looking for missing people. Not skip-tracing, there are much bigger outfits doing that. We look for heirs, and people who have run away from law suits, and sometimes accident victims. We are occasionally called on by defense attorneys to find evidence for their clients. We—”

  Gibbings waved the pipe again. “No, what I mean is, are you a sharp boy? Do you push? Can you hound and harry and finagle?”

  “I guess you’d better tell me what it’s all about.”

  Gibbings frowned, then nodded. The pipe had an alfalfa-and-haymow smell, not at all unpleasant. “Well . . . this is in confidence, of course.”

  “Of course.” Sader prepared himself to listen. “I might put in here, Mr. Gibbings, that I think you should be careful whom you select under these qualifications.”

  Gibbings grinned, showing the misplacedly small and even teeth. “I’ll be cautious . . . even now, with you. The job I need a man for concerns a child. My daughter bore a child out of wedlock—silly phrase—five years ago. She was in love with a young man and before they could marry he was drafted into the Army and sent to Japan, where he died of a fever.” Gibbings paused and waited as if to see how Sader was taking it.

  Sader wondered fleetingly why it seemed so often to be dirty linen which was brought to him. Why couldn’t he be asked, once, to run down a missing masterpiece? A first edition Milton or a Van Gogh? Or a stolen Stradivarius? Something cultural and elevating. “And the baby?”

  “It was given out for adoption.”

  “Through a recognized adoption agency?”

  Gibbings shook his head, his expression one of sudden dour gloom. He began to feel around in an inside coat pocket. “This hasn’t a damned thing to do with that angle. The adoption was private, legal, all in order, a nice couple—I saw to that.” He had found an envelope. It looked tattered as if from a great deal of handling. Gibbings took a sheet of paper from it, handed it to Sader. “This came through the mail almost a week ago. At first I wasn’t inclined to do anything about it. But then I found that it was preying on my mind. Now I find it hard to get to sleep at night and my appetite’s getting finicky.”

  Sader swung around so the light shone on the page. There was no salutation; the body of the letter began abruptly about two inches below the top of the sheet. It was typewritten, the ribbon quite pale and the over-all appearance of the lettering spotty because of uneven pressure on the keys.

  You ought to try to do something about the child who was once your daughter’s own little baby. The people you gave him to are dead and he has been taken by a relative of theirs. He is treated just terrible in that house. He goes hungry most of the time, almost starving. He is whipped and spanked every day, sometimes several times a day, and for any old reason at all, or over nothing. They don’t send him to kindergarten. They don’t let him play with the other children. I wouldn’t bother you, but I really don’t think he is going to live much longer. I think he will die.

  I could tell you the address now and maybe you’d go there and maybe you wouldn’t. After all, you are the one who gave him away to strangers when he was little and helpless. So I won’t tell you the address, and if you care enough you can find it and do something about him.

  And if you show this letter to that woman you’ll just get me into trouble, too, and she can make plenty.

  “The perversity,” Gibbings declared, “the utterly pig-headed perversity of this creature, denying me the address—”

  Sader held up a hand, shutting him off. Sader went back through the letter, reading it under his breath to himself, pausing here and there to re-examine a phrase. Then he sat looking at the window. Finally he glanced again at Gibbings. “Of course you have done some preliminary work on your own, you tried to trace these people, find out if they were really dead and to whom they might have given the boy.”

  “Naturally I did what I could, I went as far as I was able. I found out that the man of the couple, the adopted father, was killed in an airplane crash. A big airliner. Fell in Colorado. They brought him back to L.A. for burial. Happened two years ago. The baby was three, then.”

  “Tell me about this couple.”

  Gibbings made an impatient gesture. “They were just an ordinary, decent young couple. The name was Champlain. French descent, I think. He was an engineer for an electronics research outfit, made good money, must have had a pretty good brain. She’d been a schoolteacher. They wanted a baby very badly and couldn’t have one.”

  “How did you contact them?”

  “I didn’t. They came to see me. Kit’s time was about up and I’d been thinking of asking the doctor about getting foster parents, or perhaps throwing a hint to my attorney. The Champlains said they had heard we might have a baby for adoption, and they wanted to offer their credentials, or whatever. They came to my office, during office hours, and they were very nice but businesslike, and I took to them both.”

  “You had them investigated?”

  Gibbings’ flow of words was stifled and he shifted his legs, moving about as if in discomfort. “Well, no. He had documents with him, their birth certificates and their marriage license, a lot of stuff about their house mortgage and the pink slips on their two cars, plus a couple of letters, one from a banker and one from a minister. You could see they were a nice little family, solid and decent and kindly.”

  “But not immortal.”

  Gibbings gave him a hard stare. “You’re a wisecracker, huh?”

  “Your answer to that one should have been that even real parents can’t be—everyone dies. You still haven’t said anything to account for the kind of man you say you’re looking for. The semi-crook.”

  “I’m coming to it.” Gibbings’ glance was flinty; he was obviously beginning to dislike Sader heartily. “Kit had a friend, a girl named Wanda Nevins, and from things which happened afterward I got the idea that she was the one who had sent the Champlains to me. She had told them about Kit’s coming baby, and I have no doubt that she charged them for the information. They were pretty desperate, and she was . . . is . . . the kind who wouldn’t give you the time of day without a price tag on it.”

  Sader looked at the old man thoughtfully. “It’s through her, then, that you think I’ll have to go to find the child.”

  “She knows,” Gibbings agreed.

  “She offered to tell you for a price?”

  Again the air of discomfort and self-reproach appeared on Gibbings’ seamed face. “I blew my stack. I haven’t any use for her or for her kind and I let her know it.”

  Sader had put the letter on the desk beside Gibbings’ card. He made a gesture toward it. “Had it occurred to you that she might be the one who sent you this?”

  “I thought about that angle, yes. But it isn’t the way Wanda would go about it if she wanted to get money out of me. She’s much more direct. Besides—well, she wouldn’t write that kind of letter, she wouldn’t express any sympathy or concern for the child. She’d be matter-of-fact. She’d say, so-and-so is happening and if you pay me I’ll see that it’s stopped.”

  “By calling the cops? Why doesn’t the writer of the letter do just that, by the way? We have laws for the protection of children.”

  “All I know is what’s in that letter,” Gibbings snapped. “And if you’re wondering why I didn’t go to the cops, a moment’s reflection m
ight supply the answer.”

  “This involves something more important than your daughter’s reputation. You’re playing with a child’s life.”

  “If the letter is true. Which it might well not be. I’m pretty well known in Southern California, there must be a lot of people who think I’m carrying it around in suitcases. This could be a shakedown.”

  “You’ve already eliminated the one you would expect shake you down.”

  Gibbings’ mouth seemed hard and mean. “Do you want the job, or don’t you?”

  Sader opened a desk drawer, slapped a writing pad on the desk, took a pen from his coat pocket. “Let’s start with dates. The date the foster parents first came to see you. The date the baby was born. The date he was taken by the Champlains. And when Mr. Champlain died in the crash in Colorado.”

  Gibbings said, “There’s one more thing to keep straight, before this goes any further. At no time—” He stopped and seemed to think over how to word what he wanted to say. “—at no time during your investigation are you to imply that the child you are looking for is the child of my daughter. Or that he is related to me.”

  “You really must think it’s a shakedown,” Sader said, looking at him curiously.

  “Do you understand, Mr. Sader?”

  “Yes, I understand. I am trying to trace the adopted child of the Champlains. Previous antecedents unknown.”

  “That is correct, sir.”

  Sader thought, What a stiff-necked old buzzard he is, putting up an additional safeguard against ever having to claim his grandson.

  When Gibbings supplied the dates, Sader sat studying them. The Champlains had come to Gibbings’ office in late August. The child had been born a little more than two weeks later, the middle of September five years back. He had been taken from the private maternity hospital four days after birth. To Sader it seemed a hurried and casual way to dispose of a grandchild, illegitimate or not. “Did you ever see the child?” he asked, glancing up at Gibbings.

  The old man seemed intent on his pipe, which must have gone out. “Yes. Once. In the hospital nursery. I wanted to be sure that it was a normal baby, that there was nothing to prevent its adoption and complete family attachment to the Champlains.”