The Far Side of the Dollar

by Ross Macdonald

  “What’s this about kidnapping?” Sponti said in a high voice. He forced his voice down into a more soothing register: “I’m sorry, Mr. Hillman.”

  Hillman’s sitting position changed to a kind of crouch. “You’re going to be sorrier. I want to know who took my son out of here, and under what circumstances, and with whose connivance.”

  “Your son left here of his own free will, Mr. Hillman.”

  “And you wash your hands of him, do you?”

  “We never do that with any of our charges, however short their stay. I’ve hired Mr. Archer here to help you out. And I’ve just been talking to Mr. Squerry here, our comptroller.”

  The cadaverous man bowed solemnly. Black stripes of hair were pasted flat across the crown of his almost naked head. He said in a precise voice:

  “Dr. Sponti and I have decided to refund in full the money you paid us last week. We’ve just written out a check, and here it is.”

  He handed over a slip of yellow paper. Hillman crumpled it into a ball and threw it back at Mr. Squerry. It bounced off his thin chest and fell to the floor. I picked it up. It was for two thousand dollars.

  Hillman ran out of the room. I walked out after him, before Sponti could terminate my services, and caught Hillman as he was getting into the cab.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Home. My wife’s in poor shape.”

  “Let me drive you.”

  “Not if you’re Sponti’s man.”

  “I’m nobody’s man but my own. Sponti hired me to find your son. I’m going to do that if it’s humanly possible. But I’ll need some cooperation from you and Mrs. Hillman.”

  “What can we do?” He spread his large helpless hands.

  “Tell me what kind of a boy he is, who his friends are, where he hangs out—”

  “What’s the point of all that? He’s in the hands of gangsters. They want money. I’m willing to pay them.”

  The cab driver, who had got out of his seat to open the door for Hillman, stood listening with widening mouth and eyes.

  “It may not be as simple as that,” I said. “But we won’t talk about it here.”

  “You can trust me,” the driver said huskily. “I got a brother-in-law on the Highway Patrol. Besides, I never blab about my fares.”

  “You better not,” Hillman said.

  He paid the man, and came along with me to my car.

  “Speaking of money,” I said when we were together in the front seat, “you didn’t really want to throw away two thousand dollars, did you?” I smoothed out the yellow check and handed it to him.

  There’s no way to tell what will make a man break down. A long silence, or a telephone ringing, or the wrong note in a woman’s voice. In Hillman’s case, it was a check for two thousand dollars. He put it away in his alligator wallet, and then he groaned loudly. He covered his eyes with his hands and leaned his forehead on the dash. Cawing sounds came out of his mouth as if an angry crow was tearing at his vitals.

  After a while he said: “I should never have put him in this place.” His voice was more human than it had been, as if he had broken through into a deeper level of self-knowledge.

  “Don’t cry over spilt milk.”

  He straightened up. “I wasn’t crying.” It was true his eyes were dry.

  “We won’t argue, Mr. Hillman. Where do you live?”

  “In El Rancho. It’s between here and the city. I’ll tell you how to get there by the shortest route.”

  The guard limped out of his kiosk, and we exchanged half-salutes. He activated the gates. Following Hillman’s instructions, I drove out along a road which passed through a reedy wasteland where blackbirds were chittering, then through a suburban wasteland jammed with new apartments, and around the perimeter of a college campus. We passed an airport, where a plane was taking off. Hillman looked as if he wished he were on it.

  “Why did you put your son in Laguna Perdida School?”

  His answer came slowly, in bits and snatches. “I was afraid. He seemed to be headed for trouble. I felt I had to prevent it somehow. I was hoping they could straighten him out so that he could go back to regular school next month. He’s supposed to be starting his senior year in high school.”

  “Would you mind being specific about the trouble he was in? Do you mean car theft?”

  “That was one of the things. But it wasn’t a true case of theft, as I explained.”

  “You didn’t explain, though.”

  “It was Rhea Carlson’s automobile he took. Rhea and Jay Carlson are our next-door neighbors. When you leave a new Dart in an open carport all night with the key in the ignition, it’s practically an invitation to a joyride. I told them that. Jay would’ve admitted it, too, if he hadn’t had a bit of a down on Tom. Or if Tom hadn’t wrecked the car. It was fully covered, by my insurance as well as theirs, but they had to take the emotional approach.”

  “The car was wrecked?”

  “It’s a total loss. I don’t know how he managed to turn it over, but he did. Fortunately he came out of it without a scratch.”

  “Where was he going?”

  “He was on his way home. The accident happened practically at our door. I’ll show you the place.”

  “Then where had he been?”

  “He wouldn’t say. He’d been gone all night, but he wouldn’t tell me anything about it.”

  “What night was that?”

  “Saturday night. A week ago Saturday night. The police brought him home about six o’clock in the morning, and told me I better have our doctor go over him, which I did. He wasn’t hurt physically, but his mind seemed to be affected. He went into a rage when I tried to ask him where he had spent the night I’d never seen him like that before. He’d always been a quiet-spoken boy. He said I had no right to know about him, that I wasn’t really his father, and so on and so forth. I’m afraid I lost my temper and slapped him when he said that Then he turned his back on me and wouldn’t talk at all, about anything.”

  “Had he been drinking?”

  “I don’t think so. No. I would have smelled it on him.”

  “What about drugs?”

  I could see his face turn toward me, large and vague in my side vision. “That’s out of the question.”

  “I hope so. Dr. Sponti told me your son had a peculiar reaction to tranquillizers. That sometimes happens with habitual users.”

  “My son was not a drug user.”

  “A lot of young people are, nowadays, and their parents are the last to know about it.”

  “No. It wasn’t anything like that,” he said urgently. “The shock of the accident affected his mind.”

  “Did the doctor think so?”

  “Dr. Shanley is an orthopedic surgeon. He wouldn’t know about psychiatric disturbance. Anyway, he didn’t know what happened that morning, when I went to the judge’s house to arrange for bail. I haven’t told anyone about it.”

  I waited, and listened to the windshield wipers. A green and white sign on the shoulder of the road announced: “El Rancho.” Hillman said, as if he was glad to have something neutral to say:

  “You turn off in another quarter mile.”

  I slowed down. “You were going to tell me what happened that Sunday morning.”

  “No. I don’t believe I will. It has no bearing on the present situation.”

  “How do we know that?”

  He didn’t answer me. Perhaps the thought of home and neighbors had silenced him.

  “Did you say the Carlsons had a down on Tom?”

  “I said that, and it’s true.”

  “Do you know the reason for it?”

  “They have a daughter, Stella. Tom and Stella Carlson were very close. Jay and Rhea disapproved, at least Rhea did. So did Elaine, my wife, for that matter.”

  I turned off the main road. The access road passed between tall stone gateposts and became the palm-lined central road bisecting El Rancho. It was one of those rich developments whose inhabitants couldn�
��t possibly have troubles. Their big houses sat far back behind enormous lawns. Their private golf course lay across the road we were traveling on. The diving tower of their beach club gleamed with fresh aluminum paint in the wet distance.

  But like the drizzle, troubles fall in or out of season on everybody.

  The road bent around one corner of the golf course. Hillman pointed ahead to a deep gouge in the bank, where the earth was still raw. Above it a pine tree with a damaged trunk was turning brown in places.

  “This is where he turned the car over.”

  I stopped the car. “Did he explain how the accident happened?”

  Hillman pretended not to hear me. We got out of the car. There was no traffic in sight, except for a foursome of die-hard golfers approaching in two carts along the fairway.

  “I don’t see any brake- or skid-marks,” I said. “Was your son an experienced driver?”

  “Yes. I taught him to drive myself. I spent a great deal of time with him. In fact, I deliberately reduced my work load at the firm several years ago, partly so that I could enjoy Tom’s growing up.”

  His phrasing was a little strange, as if growing up was something a boy did for his parents’ entertainment. It made me wonder. If Hillman had been really close to Tom, why had he clapped him into Laguna Perdida School at the first sign of delinquency? Or had there been earlier signs which he was suppressing?

  One of the golfers waved from his cart as he went by. Hillman gave him a cold flick of the hand and got into my car. He seemed embarrassed to be found at the scene of the accident.

  “I’ll be frank with you,” I said as we drove away. “I wish you’d be frank with me. Laguna Perdida is a school for disturbed and delinquent minors. I can’t get it clear why Tom deserved, or needed, to be put there.”

  “I did it for his own protection. Good-neighbor Carlson was threatening to prosecute him for car theft.”

  “That’s nothing so terrible. He’d have rated probation, if this was a first offense. Was it?”

  “Of course it was.”

  “Then what were you afraid of?”

  “I wasn’t—” he started to say. But he was too honest, or too completely conscious of his fear, to finish the sentence.

  “What did he do Sunday morning, when you went to see the judge?”

  “He didn’t do anything, really. Nothing happened.”

  “But that nothing hit you so hard you won’t discuss it.”

  “That’s correct. I won’t discuss it, with you or anyone. Whatever happened last Sunday, or might have happened, has been completely outdated by recent events. My son has been kidnapped. He’s a passive victim, don’t you understand?”

  I wondered about that, too. Twenty-five thousand dollars was a lot of money in my book, but it didn’t seem to be in Hillman’s. If Tom was really in the hands of professional criminals, they would be asking for all that the traffic would bear.

  “How much money could you raise if you had to, Mr. Hillman?”

  He gave me a swift look. “I don’t see the point.”

  “Kidnappers usually go the limit in their demands. I’m trying to find out if they have in this case. I gather you could raise a good deal more than twenty-five thousand.”

  “I could, with my wife’s help.”

  “Let’s hope it won’t be necessary.”

  Chapter 4

  THE HILLMANS’ private drive meandered up an oak-covered rise and circled around a lawn in front of their house. It was a big old Spanish mansion, with white stucco walls, wrought-iron ornamentation at the windows, red tile roof gleaming dully in the wet. A bright black Cadillac was parked in the circle ahead of us.

  “I meant to drive myself this morning,” Hillman said. “But then I didn’t trust myself to drive. Thanks for the lift.”

  It sounded like a dismissal. He started up the front steps, and I felt a keen disappointment. I swallowed it and went after him, slipping inside the front door before he closed it.

  It was his wife he was preoccupied with. She was waiting for him in the reception hall, bowed forward in a high-backed Spanish chair which made her look tinier than she was. Her snakeskin shoes hung clear of the polished tile floor. She was a beautifully made thin blonde woman in her forties. An aura of desolation hung about her, a sense of uselessness, as if she was in fact the faded doll she resembled. Her green dress went poorly with her almost greenish pallor.

  “Elaine?”

  She had been sitting perfectly still, with her knees and fists together. She looked up at her husband, and then over his head at the huge Spanish chandelier suspended on a chain from the beamed ceiling two stories up. Its bulbs protruded like dubious fruit from clusters of wrought-iron leaves.

  “Don’t stand under it,” she said. “I’m always afraid it’s going to fall. I wish you’d have it taken down, Ralph.”

  “It was your idea to bring it back and put it there.”

  “That was a long time ago,” she said. “I thought the space needed filling.”

  “It still does, and it’s still perfectly safe.” He moved toward her and touched her head. “You’re wet. You shouldn’t have gone out in your condition.”

  “I just walked down the drive to see if you were coming. You were gone a long time.”

  “I couldn’t help it.”

  She took his hand as it slid away from her head, and held it against her breast. “Did you hear anything?”

  “We can’t expect to hear anything yet a while. I made arrangements for the money. Dick Leandro will bring it out later this afternoon. In the meantime we wait for a phone call.”

  “It’s hideous, waiting.”

  “I know. You should try to think about something else.”

  “What else is there?”

  “Lots of things.” I think he tried to name one, and gave up. “Anyway, it isn’t good for you to be sitting out here in the cold hall. You’ll give yourself pneumonia again.”

  “People don’t give it to themselves, Ralph.”

  “We won’t argue. Come into the sitting room and I’ll make you a drink.”

  He remembered me and included me in the invitation, but he didn’t introduce me to his wife. Perhaps he considered me unworthy, or perhaps he wanted to discourage communication between us. Feeling rather left out, I followed them up three tile steps into a smaller room where a fire was burning. Elaine Hillman stood with her back to it. Her husband went to the bar, which was in an alcove decorated with Spanish bullfight posters.

  She held out her hand to me. It was ice cold. “I don’t mean to monopolize the heat. Are you a policeman? I thought we weren’t to use them.”

  “I’m a private detective. Lew Archer is my name.”

  Her husband called from the alcove: “What will you drink, darling?”

  “Absinthe.”

  “Is that such a good idea?”

  “It has wormwood in it, which suits my mood. But I’ll settle for a short Scotch.”

  “What about you, Mr. Archer?”

  I asked for the same. I needed it. While I rather liked both of the Hillmans, they were getting on my nerves. Their joint handling of their anxiety was almost professional, as if they were actors improvising a tragedy before an audience of one. I don’t mean the anxiety wasn’t sincere. They were close to dying of it.

  Hillman came back across the room with three lowball glasses on a tray. He set it down on a long table in front of the fireplace and handed each of us a glass. Then he shook up the wood fire with a poker. Flames hissed up the chimney. Their reflection changed his face for a moment to a red savage mask.

  His wife’s face hung like a dead moon over her drink. “Our son is very dear to us, Mr. Archer. Can you help us get him back?”

  “I can try. I’m not sure it’s wise to keep the police out of this. I’m only one man, and this isn’t my normal stamping ground.”

  “Does that make a difference?”

  “I have no informers here.”

  “Do you hear him,
Ralph?” she said to her crouching husband. “Mr. Archer thinks we should have the police in.”

  “I hear him. But it isn’t possible.” He straightened up with a sigh, as if the whole weight of the house was on his shoulders. “I’m not going to endanger Tom’s life by anything I do.”

  “I feel the same way,” she said. “I’m willing to pay through the nose to get him back. What use is money without a son to spend it on?”

  That was another phrase that was faintly strange. I was getting the impression that Tom was the center of the household, but a fairly unknown center, like a god they made sacrifices to and expected benefits from, and maybe punishments, too. I was beginning to sympathize with Tom.

  “Tell me about him, Mrs. Hillman.”

  Some life came up into her dead face. But before she could open her mouth Hillman said: “No. You’re not going to put Elaine through that now.”

  “But Tom’s a pretty shadowy figure to me. I’m trying to get some idea of where he might have gone yesterday, how he got tangled up with extortionists.”

  “I don’t know where he went,” the woman said.

  “Neither do I. If I had,” Hillman said, “I’d have gone to him yesterday.”

  “Then I’m going to have to go out and do some legwork. You can let me have a picture, I suppose.”

  Hillman went into an adjoining room, twilit behind pulled drapes, where the open top of a grand piano leaned up out of the shadows. He came back with a silver-framed studio photograph of a boy whose features resembled his own. The boy’s dark eyes were rebellious, unless I was projecting my own sense of the household into them. They were also intelligent and imaginative. His mouth was spoiled.

  “Can I take this out of the frame? Or if you have a smaller one, it would be better to show around.”

  “To show around?”

  “That’s what I said, Mr. Hillman. It’s not for my memory book.”

  Elaine Hillman said: “I have a smaller one upstairs on my dressing table. I’ll get it.”