Sleep with Slander Page 8

  “What did you do?”

  “I had Mr. Nevins sit down and I brought out some lemonade and chocolate cake. Pretty soon Ricky came back, and I gave him a glass of lemonade and got him to eat some cake, and then he didn’t seem so frightened.”

  “Do you think Ricky had any idea he was adopted? Of course he was young to try to explain—”

  “Of course not! Why, I didn’t know myself, not to be certain. I used to wonder a little, some of the things I saw in the house, the baby things—”

  “What did this man Nevins say to you? Why had he come at this time? What were his plans for the little boy?” Sader wanted to rush her along, pry all the truth from her in one lump. “Did he seem like the kind of man you’d want to turn the child over to?”

  “Yes—I—” She seemed to bristle, the eyes behind the steel-rimmed lenses glowed with resentment. “Who are you? What’s the idea of making out like I was in the wrong? Are you a relative, you want the little boy for yourself?”

  Sader thought that it was late for this kind of curiosity from her. Either she’d been busy covering something, some secret or a lie, or she was simply a very gullible old lady. “My name is Sader and I’m a detective.”

  “I haven’t done anything wrong. I don’t have to be afraid of the law.”

  “I’m not the law. I’m a private detective. I’ve taken on the job of finding the little boy.”

  Her pudgy hands were clenched. “I’ve told you where to find him.”

  “I went to that house,” Sader said grimly, “and there aren’t any kids in it.”

  “Well . . . I did what I thought best,” she stammered. There was something almost infantile in her fright. She was like an ancient child accused of a fault she couldn’t comprehend. “He was the boy’s father and he wanted Ricky back.”

  “Let me tell you how it was,” Sader said. “You were at the house alone with the boy, the mother was dead. No husband, either. You had no idea who might show up to take the kid off your hands, nor how long you’d be required to stay with him, unpaid perhaps. This man who said he was Ricky’s father came and you believed him, perhaps with some reservations. If he had wanted to take the little boy away at that time, you might have asked for identification, some proof that he was who he said he was. But he didn’t take the kid, and then he didn’t come back right away. Mrs. Champlain’s aunt went to the house a week or ten days after her death and you were still there, with nothing to eat and no one offering to pay you for your time.”

  Mrs. Cecil had begun to nod in a stricken sort of way.

  “When this man, this so-called father, came back he must have looked like a godsend. You knew from the aunt that Mrs. Champlain’s family had discarded the little boy like a piece of trash. You must have been pretty desperate.”

  Some of the fright left her face, and she drew a long relaxing breath.

  “I’m not blaming you at all, Mrs. Cecil. No one could. You were in a tough spot. You were doing more for the kid than the mother’s family—hell, they’d abandoned him. Even so, you must have begun to think of calling on Juvenile Hall.”

  She shook her head. “I hated to do that.”

  Sader made note of the phrase, remembering Brent Perrine’s description of the quiet self-effacing little boy. Mrs. Cecil had been very fond of Ricky. He would have bet that when Tina’s cupboard had finally been bare, food was brought from her own house. “Of course you kept hoping that this man would come back, and then he did, and your troubles were over. I have reason to think that Ricky’s were just beginning.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “My client thinks Ricky is being abused, wherever he is. I want you to tell me everything about this father of his that you can remember. Every scrap.”

  Now the fright had changed to apprehension. “Ricky isn’t treated right?”

  “Just tell me about this Mr. Nevins.”

  “He said he was Ricky’s father.”

  “And Ricky tried to crawl under the bed.”

  “Well, he was shy. A quiet, shy little boy. He never made up with strangers. When I kept him I never had to worry that he’d get out and let someone take him into their car. Like, you know, a fiend or something.”

  “I see.”

  She frowned, trying to concentrate. “He didn’t look much like Ricky. I remember how that struck me. Ricky is slender and small, dark hair, and this man was tall and very blond. He had the kind of hair—well, you see it at the beach. Sun-streaked. And he was tanned.”

  “The outdoor type,” Sader said. “How was he dressed?”

  “Very nicely. My son’s always liked good clothes, and I’ve learned to judge men’s things a little. My husband . . . he was a working man. Jimmy’s in an office, he has to look neat. I thought at the time, when Ricky’s father first came, that he must be making good money because his clothes were so good and then he had the car. It looked expensive.”

  “When did he finally take Ricky away?”

  “Two weeks to the day that Mrs. Champlain had drowned.”

  “Did he ever offer any explanation as to why he first showed up when he did?”

  She was obviously trying hard, sorting the fading memories. “He said that Ricky had been given away without his permission.”

  “Did he mention Ricky’s mother, the real mother?”

  “No. I noticed that.”

  Was it possible that Gibbings was wrong, that the man Kit Gibbings had loved did know about the child, and that this Nevins was he? Then Sader thought of the proper question. “How old was he?”

  “He was awfully young, I mean to be Ricky’s father. I said something to him, some remark about how old he’d been when Ricky was born, and he said he had been seventeen.”

  That knocks it, Sader thought. This wasn’t Kit Gibbings’ sweetheart. This man had been a fake. Someone sent to claim Tina Champlain’s little boy. But why? For God’s sake, why? To take the kid away to starve him, to beat and degrade him? Sader had the buffeting sensation of having caught the tail end of a nightmare.

  “The second time he came he brought Ricky a present. I guess that’s why I decided to trust him,” Mrs. Cecil said on a note of apology, as if Sader was going to tell her she’d done wrong.

  Sader lifted an eyebrow and she added, “A Chinese puzzle sort of thing, a funny little pugnose dog made out of bits of wood. You took him apart and then you tried to put him together again.”

  “A Chinese puzzle.” Sader was thinking of the big Buddha in Wanda’s living room, the Oriental arrangement and furnishings.

  “It was too old for Ricky, he couldn’t figure it out.”

  It could mean a link, or nothing. It could mean that someone was unfamiliar with the tastes of five-year-olds.

  “Did this man make any promises about letting you see Ricky again? Bringing him back for a visit? A phone call?”

  “No . . . except as he left, he said, ‘Come see us sometime.’ He’d already given me the Laguna Beach address, his first visit. I didn’t think much about the invitation to come down there because I thought he wanted to forget he and his boy had ever been separated.”

  “He must be a good actor.”

  She was silent, watching Sader with stubborn mistrustful eyes.

  “Are you sure you didn’t meet this young woman, Wanda Nevins? She was a good friend of Tina Champlain’s.”

  “I don’t think she ever came around her while she lived next to me.”

  “Tina Champlain might have mentioned the name.”

  “I don’t remember it. I didn’t meet any of her friends except Mr. Perrine and his father. It was as if she’d cut herself off from her old life, I thought. She’d made a clean break, she’d met Mr. Perrine afterward and he was about all she had.”

  “No relatives mentioned?”

  “Not to me. That aunt was a big surprise.”

  “What about the little boy—some means of identification, scars and birthmarks, and so on?”

  “He didn’t have any. He ha
d a perfect little body. Oh, he was getting sort of thin He was a quiet child, soft-spoken, never in your way. But he never even had a cold, nor sniffles, during the time I knew them.”

  “The beach air must have agreed with him, then. He was sickly when she moved from West L.A.”

  Mrs. Cecil shook her head. “I wouldn’t know about that. I moved in after Mrs. Champlain had lived there a while—several months at least.”

  Sader knew that he had another drive to Laguna ahead of him. He thanked Mrs. Cecil and took his leave.

  CHAPTER NINE

  SADER DROVE down the coast, fast. Dark had drawn in. The wind whined against the car. There were a few lights out at sea, pinpricks on the black, a couple of passing ships and a twinkling tower where they were drilling offshore for oil. When Sader got to Huntington Beach he pulled into a drive-in for coffee. He hadn’t eaten since breakfast, still wasn’t hungry. He felt nervous and full of an apprehension that had no focus. Mad, too. He had the sensation of having run through a bog, of the bog having attached itself to him, sucking underfoot.

  He drank the coffee too fast and burned himself.

  Two nights ago, his first meeting with old man Gibbings, the case had seemed straight as an arrow, not much more than a casual errand. Find a kid and let Gibbings know where he was. Like that.

  Sader slapped fifty cents on the tray and honked his horn, though a sign on the side of the drive-in asked specifically that lights alone be blinked when one was ready to leave.

  He sailed through Newport and Balboa, climbed the hill to Corona del Mar, sailed on southward toward Laguna. When the time came to turn, he almost overshot, had to brake fast, heard tires squeal behind him. A car skidded past, a profane voice drifting back to him. Sader drove up the hill to Wanda’s house. He parked and crossed the courtyard, passing the raised bed—in it an Oriental garden light struck patterns on the papyrus and banana trees. He rang the bell. There was no sound of music from inside as before, and no one came to answer.

  He knocked. The door sounded thick and secure under his knuckles. He tried to find a way to see inside, but the windows were small and high and opaque. They showed a reflected light, though. He went around the house, through the open space between it and the garage. The wind funneled in here, chilled with the smell and taste of the sea. He found a window, and it was one he could see through. Past a darkened alcove of some kind, probably a dining space, he could see a part of the living room. The big Buddha sat there counting his toes, there was the end of a shoji screen, a stack of cushions, but no sign of Wanda Nevins.

  He went farther, found the door of the kitchen, tried the knob. It was locked. Past the door was another window, shoulder-high; Sader figured it must be the window above the sink, and he was pleased to see that inside the screen the pane was lifted. He was working on the screen when he heard a growl. He cupped his eyes, sticking his face against the screen, and inside in the dim dark he saw a four-legged shape and a double row of the finest dog teeth anywhere. The dog was on the sink, looking at Sader and baring his fangs. Sader whistled softly and said, “Hey, Brucie, you remember me.”

  This must not have been Bruce. It didn’t go away and the growls increased. Sader drew back, then jabbed a finger hard at the window and was rewarded by the sound of a businesslike snap.

  “You want to be like that, it’s okay with me,” Sader said. He could see the brute’s eyes gleaming in there like a pair of wet marbles.

  He stepped over to the door. There was a faint thump, as the dog jumped off the sink. “You in there, baby?”

  Baby growled to let him know.

  “Tell Mama I’ll be back.”

  He tried the doorbell one last time, a forlorn hope, and then went back to the car. He had the door open, one foot inside, when he decided to take a good look at the big house on the side of the hill across the street. The wide windows blazed with light. Probably it was designed to give a fine view of the sea, but it should give a fine view too of whatever went on over here. Provided the neighbors chose to look. Sader crossed the street and climbed about twenty-five stone steps, crossed a flagstone terrace and rang the bell.

  A man with a red face, bald-headed, in his pants and undershirt and carrying a can of beer, opened the door and said, “Yeah?”

  “I’m looking for Miss Nevins.”

  “She ain’t here. Our name’s Pickett. You got the wrong number, buddy.”

  A big television set was going full blast in the room, the corner away from the windows, and a woman was sitting facing it; she didn’t even look around at Sader. “I know,” Sader said, “she’s your neighbor across the street. I thought you might know where she is tonight.”

  “We bought this place up here on this hill because it’s private,” said the bald-headed man. “We lived for more’n twenty years in Minneapolis, lived with my mother-in-law and my wife’s brothers, and when we come out here we was ready to be alone. And we are. And we ain’t prying and spying on nobody.”

  “Oh, it wasn’t that—”

  “You bet it wasn’t. I don’t even know her name.”

  Sader said desperately, “But you’ve seen her.”

  “She waved one morning and I didn’t wave back. Like I said, we come here to have our own life, to ourselves. I couldn’t tell you if she’s a blonde or a redhead or what.”

  The door was closing. “Have you seen a child? A little boy?”

  “Nope. Two dogs. Big ones. That’s all.” He jammed the door shut in Sader’s face.

  Sader drove on into Laguna, found a public phone booth at the edge of a parking lot, looked for the name of Nevins. Wanda was there, and that was all. No Mr. Nevins. Sader put in a dime and rang the number, just in case she was home now, but got no answer.

  He went out, the bog clinging to his feet, and got into the car and sat there looking through the windshield at the main intersection of Laguna, the place where the canyon road met the coast highway, and all the spinning lights and the dancing neon had their echoes behind his eyes; he was dizzy. “I don’t believe it,” he said out loud. “I don’t believe the damned kid even exists.” But then that didn’t work either; he got to remembering what Mrs. Cecil had said about the sun-tanned man who had driven a red convertible and had taken Ricky Champlain away, probably with her waving a happy good-by from the porch, and Sader wanted to beat his fist on the steering wheel.

  He decided he must be hungry. He had a cheeseburger and a glass of milk and a cigarette, tried to relax. Tried to remember whatever it was he’d been doing when old man Gibbings had walked in. Probably something important, and they were losing clients and gaining a bad reputation by the minute because he wasn’t attending to it. The carhop came and thanked him for the tip and took the tray away. As she walked into the light her legs shone like silk below the fluffy skirt, and Sader yawned, and then thought, My God, I really must be beat. I don’t even want a second look. He rubbed his head.

  He hated to drive back without having seen Wanda Nevins.

  He tried to think back through that last talk he’d had with her, late in the office. She’d said, “You can admit, for instance, that the people who want to find the baby don’t want to give him any money. They want him.” And then Sader had craftily side-stepped by letting her know that it was old man Gibbings they were both talking about, and that there was nothing she could sell Gibbings but that if she wanted to let go of the information, the kid’s whereabouts, he’d give her a hundred. It would go on the expense account, a nice short cut and cheap at the price he saw now; but she hadn’t responded as he had thought she might.

  In fact, she’d acted as if he had just popped a Roman candle in her face. And going to the door, that last crack: “Mr. Sader, you’re working in the dark.”

  He answered her now: “I sure am, kiddo.”

  But what in the hell had she meant by it?

  Turning in the seat to go back from his slot beside the restaurant, Sader saw a white square in the back seat, and remembered the box of nothings he h
ad found in the trash barrel at Tina’s place. He made a promise to himself: first thing in the morning he’d hit Betty’s Baby Shop.

  He awoke in the middle of the night, again, and smoked, and stood at the window to stare at the lights and to listen to the jets. They were busy tonight, probably having some sort of tactical wingding, and the old house vibrated to their goings and comings. It wasn’t raining, the night was clear, there was a look of peace about the empty dim-lit streets and the far-off glow of the airfield, and Sader wished that some of the repose would invade his soul. He itched inwardly with a restless anger.

  There was some whole item, like a screw loose in a crippled machine, that was fouling it all. He couldn’t find it but he could sense it. He could sense the lack of orientation in himself, the failure to come to grips, the fumbling with chaos like a puzzle that didn’t fit and wouldn’t fit until the pieces that didn’t belong had been tossed out. And what didn’t belong? Where was the screw loose? “I’m damned if I know,” he told the windowpane. “I’m full as hell of similes but I can’t figure worth a hoot.”

  In the morning he rolled out and showered and shaved and dressed. He had a cup of coffee. He fed the parrot, who tried to take off a couple of fingers with an iron beak. The friendly setter wanted to jump upon him and lick his face. He managed to slobber on Sader’s necktie, which had to be changed. Finally Sader got the pair all watered and fed, and left.

  Betty’s Baby Shop was north of Santa Monica, near the beach, and Sader drove by Tina’s house on the way. The morning was cloudy and gray. The broken houses waiting to be moved looked inexpressibly lost and forgotten. Sader knew that there was nothing to see, nothing to be found, but whenever he looked at the place he was struck by the sudden change Tina seemed to have made in her life, coming here. Perhaps this was a part of the secret that eluded him. For some reason she had broken with her past, discarded old friends, rejected her church and its associations.