Sleep with Slander Read online

  Ralph Perrine peered at Sader through the screen. The screen was fuzzy with dust; perhaps he didn’t see Sader too well. The afternoon sun had come out a little stronger, and from the rain-dampened yard behind the house came the smells of wet wood and varnish. Nearer at hand, on the other side of the screen, was the odor of muscatel. Perrine rubbed the disordered gray hair from his eyes and grunted, “Oh . . . uh . . . it’s you again.”

  “It’s me,” Sader agreed. “I’ve got to see your son.”

  “He isn’t here.” Perrine sniffled and drew a hand across his nose. He’d been hitting it, he wasn’t the same man Sader had encountered yesterday. “What do you want with him, anyhow?”

  “I have to have the name of the woman who took care of. Mrs. Champlain’s baby when he and she went out on dates.” Sader got close enough to the screen to see the wavering eyes. “In case you know it—”

  “I don’t. No. Maybe Brent don’t even know it, now. Maybe he forgot it.”

  “I’d like to ask him.”

  “He’s out buying something or other for one of the boats.”

  “I’ll wait, then.”

  There was a moment of hesitation. Then Perrine started to open the screen. He pushed it out an inch or so and then changed his mind, “Well, might as well go look. He could of come back by now.” Perrine came out on the porch. He still wore what he’d had on yesterday, the tired shirt and the work pants, but they showed in indefinable ways that he had slept in them. He looked rumpled and dilapidated, and Sader judged that he’d drunk his way through the night and what was gone of the day. He sniffled on his hand again, and stumbled down the front steps, around the house to the back yard.

  Sader noticed a can of white paint, the lid off, spilled in the dusty grass. Perrine seemed to notice it at the same time. He grunted in anger, or surprise, and went to it and tipped it upright with his shoe. Then Sader noticed something else, a long splintered mark along the freshly painted prow of the near hull.

  He went closer, put a finger into the narrow groove. The mark had been made on a surface not yet dried. The broken splinters were still damp to the touch.

  The white paintbrush lay about ten feet beyond, at the edge of some piled tarps and other gear. To Sader the silence suddenly took on’ an empty quality, a sort of waiting. He looked back at old man Perrine, who was rubbing his nose and staring at the marked hull.

  Sader walked past the stern of the hull, to the heap of gear. Behind it Brent Perrine sat on the ground, doubled over, gripping his thigh. Sader jumped a couple of coiled hawsers and bent over him. Brent looked up, a grimace twisting his lips so that his big white teeth showed. “Get me something. A towel, anything My damned leg’s bleeding.”

  The pants leg was soaked red and there were thick drops spattered below Brent’s lifted knee.

  The father stumbled past Sader and his son kicked out at him with his good leg. “Goddam you, didn’t you hear me yelling?”

  “Didn’t hear nothing.”

  Sader turned back to the house, went up the stairs to the kitchen, looked in some cupboard drawers. He found a clean dishcloth, went back out to the yard. But Brent waved him off. “I’d better go inside. I don’t want the neighbors staring.”

  Sader glanced around. There were no houses near. To the south was an empty lot with a FOR SALE sign in it, littered with weeds and cans. To the north was the brick wall of a machine shop. Long ago someone had built the old house, probably in the middle of a block of lawn, with the hopes that other big homes would be built to neighbor it; but all that had happened was that it had sat alone for a long time and then the block had been split into lots and sold.

  The old man leaned down toward Brent, and Brent grabbed him savagely and forced himself to his feet. He tried to walk, but then Sader had to help. The three of them staggered in zigzags toward the back porch while Brent cursed under his breath. At the steps Sader took a quick look backward and saw the red splashes here and there, bright in the dead grass, but not too many; and he judged that the bleeding must be subsiding. He had left the dishcloth out there; he made a mental note of this excuse to go back later.

  In the kitchen Brent flopped on a chair and clutched his leg, making a hissing noise between his teeth. His father got a pair of scissors out of a drawer and came wandering over to pluck at the blood-soaked pants leg, and Brent yelled at him, “Goddam it, do you want to ruin the pants too? Wait’ll I get them off.”

  Old man Perrine said blearily, “There’s a couple of holes in them already.”

  Brent was wriggling, pulling the pants loose from his waist.

  Sader said, “Somebody took a shot at you. Either they’re a rotten shot, or they only meant to scare you. The bullet ricocheted off the hull and hit you down there.” Brent had the pants down around his shoes and was staring at the inside of his left thigh. There was a long, bleeding gouge in the flesh that made Sader think of the mark on the hull. “Well, it didn’t do much more than nick you.”

  “It bled like hell,” Brent said, relief in his tone. He had thought it would be a lot worse, obviously. “Hey, I won’t need a doctor or anything. Just antiseptic and bandages.”

  “Get a tetanus shot just to be safe,” Sader told him.

  Brent’s eyes were losing their ferocious, shocked look. “Yeah, yeah. Dad, bring me the first-aid kit. It’s in the hall closet, the top shelf.”

  Sader said, “Aren’t you kind of curious about who shot you?”

  The room got quiet suddenly. Old man Perrine had started for the hall, and he stopped, and looked at Sader as if Sader had just made some unpardonably rude remark. The anger came back into Brent’s face.

  “People who aren’t afraid to try to scare you that way might not be afraid to aim better next time,” Sader pointed out.

  “I want any advice from you, I’ll ask you for it.”

  Sader shrugged, turned to the kitchen door.

  “Where are you going?” Brent demanded.

  “I left something out there.”

  “You damned well leave it, then.” He must have felt a twinge of pain from his wound at this point, for he flinched and put an involuntary hand down. “What did you come for, anyway?”

  “I need the name of the woman who stayed with Mrs. Champlain’s baby when she went out with you.”

  “I don’t remember it.”

  Sader moved away from the door, found a chair and sat down.

  Brent said, “Mrs. Cecil. She lived next door.”

  “First name?”

  “I don’t know. I really don’t know. Tina always called her Mrs. Cecil. She was a gray-haired old lady, had a son living nearby. Maybe she’s moved in with him.”

  “Did Tina Champlain ever say anything to you about the baby’s father? Not her husband. I mean the real father. That he’d ever come around, or she’d seen him? Anything at all?”

  “Hell, no. I don’t think she knew anything about the baby’s real parents.”

  Sader wondered if Tina Champlain had deliberately given this impression or if it was something Brent had mistakenly taken for granted.

  Ralph Perrine came back carrying a white tin box, put it on the floor by Brent’s chair, opened it to expose packed medications and rolls of gauze and adhesive tape. He fumbled for a small bottle of iodine, began to unscrew the cap. Sader rose as if to leave.

  Brent motioned to him. “Wait a minute. How’re you coming with this job of yours?”

  “I’m still looking.”

  “It shouldn’t be too hard to find the kid. Did you locate Tina’s aunt?”

  “I talked to her but she doesn’t know who has the baby. She seems to think Mrs. Champlain made a big mistake in taking him. I got the impression the whole family washed its hands of him as soon as Tina Champlain died.” Sader was watching Brent for any reaction, but Brent was now engrossed in caring for his wound. He had yanked the bottle of antiseptic away from the old man and had begun to run the applicator against the gouged mark in his thigh. It must have hurt badly,
for he stopped almost at once and sat there, the painful grimace on his face again.

  Sader tried again. “This elderly woman who was caring for the baby told the aunt—according to the aunt’s story—that the baby’s real father was coming to get him. I can’t help wondering: How would she know the real father if she saw him? Providing even Mrs. Champlain didn’t know him?”

  “It sounds screwy,” Brent said; but Sader caught the note of caution in his voice and guessed that Brent was thinking it through and adding it to other things already known.

  “If the baby’s father had contacted Mrs. Champlain, would she have mentioned it to you?”

  “Hell, yes,” Brent said at once. His father had opened another bottle of medicine, had dipped a cotton swab into it. As he inched over to touch the red wound with the swab, Brent balled a fist and hit him right below the collarbone, and sent him spinning. “You goddam old wino, leave me be.”

  The air seemed to crackle with hatred and fury.

  Sader kept calm. “When you were going with Mrs. Champlain, engaged to her, did you ever talk about adopting the baby after the marriage?”

  “Yeah, we talked about it.”

  “Did you check on the little boy after she died?”

  “I figured that was her folks’ business.” Brent was leaning over the wounded leg, staring at the old man. Ralph Perrine was crouched in injured silence, the open bottle dribbling antiseptic through his fingers.

  “Did you like the kid?”

  “Look, goddam it, leave me alone. I’ve told you all I know. Sure, I liked the kid okay. What’s to like about a five-year-old kid? He’s just there, that’s all. This one wasn’t sassy and he kept out of my way and if Tina wanted him it was okay by me.”

  “Who hated her enough to take the child and abuse him after she died?”

  It seemed to jerk Brent up short. He quit glaring at his father and turned a blank, angry stare on Sader. “Who? Nobody. You must be nuts, thinking a thing like that.”

  Sader shook his head. He opened the door and went out. Out at the boat, he studied the mark on the freshly painted hull. He didn’t find any spent bullet, though it must have been there somewhere.

  From inside the house there was a noise as if a chair had crashed, or had hit a wall, and Sader waited; but there was nothing more. The Perrines were settling their disagreement privately.

  He tried to figure, from the angle of the mark on the hull, where the person holding the gun had stood, but this was fruitless. The bullet had been sharply deflected on striking the hardwood surface, it had gouged an irregular channel and been further deflected by the cross grain. He couldn’t even make out where Perrine had been, though he had a hunch that Perrine had somehow been warned, had thrown the paint bucket and brush off into the grass as he had run. There was the whole stretch of trampled grass, the back of the house, the vacant lot next door—the shot could have come from any of these.

  The poor aim might have simply been an accident, the effort of trying to hit a running target, and Brent Perrine might be in much more danger than he himself seemed to suppose.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  BY THE time Sader got to Santa Monica the sun was in the west, dipping into a fog bank out across the Pacific. He could smell and feel the sea, without being able to see it. The mountainous heap of earth that was to be a freeway seemed poised over the wrecked houses like the blunt end of an avalanche. There was no sign of its having been worked on during the day. Sader concluded that they were waiting for the land to be cleared. He got out of his car and walked around Tina Champlain’s house, went out into the back yard and even peered into the trash barrel. The ashy smell of the old incinerator tainted the air. He had no purpose but the faint desire to delay coming to grips with a handful of feathers.

  The only Cecil living in this part of Santa Monica was a Lloyd Cecil, two blocks over. He drove there, parked, got out again. It was a block of small neat homes, not new but pretty well kept. The sort of neighborhood where people exchanged plant cuttings, so that everyone had a patch of ivy geraniums out by the curb, and almost everybody had elephant’s ear and jacobinia by the porch, like a thread woven from yard to yard. Sader went to the door and knocked. An elderly woman opened it, almost at once.

  “Mrs. Cecil?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Are you the Mrs. Cecil who used to take care of Mrs. Champlain’s baby?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Would you happen to know who has him? Where he is now?”

  “I believe I do.”

  She spoke calmly, confidently, and looked at him directly through her steel-rimmed specs, but Sader wanted to chew his lips and scratch himself. Frustration had become a habit and he was wary of letting it go. People in this affair didn’t just come out and offer to tell you things, and he almost disliked her for offering to do it.

  “Where is he?”

  “I’ll have to look up the address. Would you like to come in and wait while I find it?”

  He went in. The room was small, and furnished in an ordinary way. In the dining room, past an archway, he saw an oversized painting hung on the wall, a stag at bay with a bunch of wolves, full of blood and snow; and he thought it was a rather odd decoration and then remembered that his grandmother had kept a large oil of a trio of dead ducks and hunting paraphernalia on her own wall and right where Sader had had to look at it when he had been taken to her house for dinner. The ducks had seemed terribly defunct to Sader’s young eyes.

  Mrs. Cecil had padded to a built-in cabinet beside the gas log fireplace and opened a glass-paned door and taken out a cardboard box. She adjusted the specs on her nose and lifted the box lid, took out some papers, set the box in the cupboard, and began to read. After scrutinizing a half-dozen odd-sized scraps she said, “Now I just know it’s here someplace,” and Sader felt the familiar disappointment and thought of Tina’s little boy, waiting somewhere to be found.

  Maybe hungry at this minute, or afraid.

  But then she had it. “Down the coast, near Laguna.” She twitched the paper toward the light and read aloud Wanda Nevins’ address.

  Sader wanted to yank the scrap of paper from her hands, verify what he had heard, but instead he said, “May I sit down?”

  She looked at him over the specs. “Why, sure, go ahead.” Her manner implied that she was surprised he wasn’t ready to go, since she’d given him what he wanted. Sader made note of the lack of curiosity, or any question about himself. “Do you mind telling me about the person who came to get the baby?”

  “He was the baby’s father.” She was growing a little uncertain, but still held the scrap of paper as if it might have what Sader wanted.

  “I mean, a description. How he looked, the name he gave. A car, if he drove one.”

  Her eyes lit up behind the specs. “He drove a very nice car.”

  “Do you remember the make and the year?”

  “Oh, no. I don’t drive and I know very little about cars. But it was red and it was the kind you can put the top down.”

  A red convertible, Sader made note, adding a private bet that it had been rented. “And what was he like?”

  “Mr. Nevins? Well, he was tall and—”

  “Wait a minute.” Sader had almost jumped out of the chair. “Mr. Nevins?”

  She nodded, looking a little anxious now. “Why, yes. Is anything wrong? He seemed like such a nice man to me.”

  “Did you ever meet a friend of Mrs. Champlain’s named Wanda Nevins?”

  She blinked, even more disturbed now. “No. Is she a relative of Mr. Nevins?”

  “I don’t know.” Sader felt absolutely flabbergasted and knew that it showed in his face.

  “I didn’t meet many of Mrs. Champlain’s friends,” Mrs. Cecil explained. “Mostly I stayed with the little boy when she went out with her gentleman friend. That was Mr. Perrine. He has a boat-building place in Wilmington. That is, I believe he has a regular job and the boat-building is something he does on the side. M
rs. Champlain mentioned it to me. If they’d got married, he was going into the boat-building full time.”

  “This man who came to the house and said he was the baby’s real father . . . he couldn’t have been Brent Perrine?”

  “Oh, no,” she cried, as if Sader must be crazy. “I know Mr. Perrine. I met his father, too. It wasn’t either of them. I told you, it was Mr. Nevins!”

  “When was the first time the baby’s father came?”

  She was growing uneasy. She retreated cautiously to a chair and sat down, fingering the bit of paper. “When he first got here, I remember I was crying. I was still upset over hearing about Mrs. Champlain. She was drowned on a Saturday. He must have come on the next day, Sunday, late on Sunday. They phoned me from Catalina on Sunday morning, Mr. Perrine’s father telling me they couldn’t find her. I cried all day. Every time I looked at Ricky and thought about his mother being dead, I started crying all over again.”

  Sader flinched, thinking: Ricky. It was the first time he had heard the boy’s name. Up to now Tina Champlain’s child had had a certain anonymity, a lack of substance now supplied by the name, and having him thus identified made Sader want to squirm. A kid named Ricky had hunger and pain that was real. You couldn’t endure thinking of the child’s body subjected to abuse; the tears were warm and wet, and the sobs were something you heard if you stopped to listen. “When this man came, did he know that Mrs. Champlain was dead?”

  The question seemed to startle her. “Why, I . . . I suppose so. I must have blurted something out as soon as he came to the door. I must have explained why I was crying like that.”

  “So you don’t really know whether he had heard of her death, or not?”

  “No. . . .” She hesitated. “Wouldn’t he have acted surprised, though?”

  “Perhaps. How did he seem with the little boy? Fatherly?”

  She straightened the edge of a rag rug with her toe. “That part of it was kind of awkward. Ricky didn’t know him and he acted scared, he ran and tried to hide under the bed.”