“What do I do if he comes out?”
“Call the police and tell them to arrest him.”
“I can’t do that,” he said uneasily. “I know he’s a bad actor, but I got nothing definite to go on.”
“I have. If you’re forced to call the police, tell them Sipe is wanted in Pacific Point on suspicion of kidnapping. But don’t call them unless you have to. Sipe is my best witness, and once he’s arrested I’ll never see him again.”
“Where are you going?”
“To see if I can trace the boy.”
His eyes brightened. “Is he the one that’s been in all the papers? What’s his name? Hillman?”
“He’s the one.”
“I should have recognized him. I dunno, I don’t pay too much attention to people’s faces. But I can tell you what kind of a car they drive.”
“Does Sipe have a car?”
“Yeah. It’s a ’53 Ford with a cracked engine. I put some goop in it for him, but it’s due to die any day.”
Before I left, I asked Daly if he had seen anyone else around the hotel. He had, and he remembered. Mike Harley had been there Monday morning, driving the car with the Idaho license. I guessed that Tom had been riding in the trunk.
“And just last night,” he said, “there was this other young fellow driving a brand-new Chewy. I think he had a girl with him, or maybe a smaller fellow. I was just closed up, and my bright lights were off.”
“Did you get a good look at the driver?”
“Not so good, no. I think he was dark-haired, a nice-looking boy. What he was doing with that crumb-bum—” Shaking his head some more, Ben started to get out of my car. He froze in mid-action: “Come to think of it, what’s the Hillman boy been doing walking around? I thought he was a prisoner and everybody in Southern California was looking for him.”
“We are.”
It took me a couple of hours, with the help of several bus-company employees, to sort out the driver who had picked Tom up last night. His name was Albertson and he lived far out La Cienaga in an apartment over a bakery. The sweet yeasty smell of freshly made bread permeated his small front room.
It was still very early in the morning. Albertson had pulled on trousers over his pajamas. He was a square-shouldered man of about forty, with alert eyes. He nodded briskly over the picture:
“Yessir. I remember him. He got on my bus at the Barcelona intersection and bought a ticket into Santa Monica. He didn’t get off at Santa Monica, though.”
“Why not?”
He rubbed his heavily bearded chin. The sound rasped on my nerves. “Would he be wanted for something?” Albertson said.
“He would.”
“That’s what I thought at the time. He started to get off and then he saw somebody inside the station and the kid went back to his seat. I got off for a rest stop and it turned out there was a cop inside. When I came back the boy was still on the bus. I told him this was as far as his fare would take him. So he asked me to sell him a ticket to L. A. I was all set to go and I didn’t make an issue. If the kid was in trouble, it wasn’t up to me to turn him in. I’ve been in trouble myself. Did I do wrong?”
“You’ll find out on Judgment Day.”
He smiled. “That’s a long time to wait. What’s the pitch on the kid?”
“Read it in the papers, Mr. Albertson. Did he ride all the way downtown?”
“Yeah. I’m sure he did. He was one of the last ones to get off the bus.”
I went downtown and did some bird-dogging in and around the bus station. Nobody remembered seeing the boy. Of course, the wrong people were on duty at this time in the morning. I’d stand a better chance if I tried again in the evening. And it was time I got back to Otto Sipe.
Ben Daly said he hadn’t come out of the hotel. But when we went to Sipe’s room the door was standing open and he was gone. Before he left he had finished the bottle of whisky by his bed.
“He must have had a master key, Ben. Is there any way out of here except the front?”
“No sir. He has to be on the grounds some place.”
We went around to the back of the sprawling building, past a dry swimming pool with a drift of brown leaves in the deep end. Under the raw bluff which rose a couple of hundred feet behind the hotel were the employees’ dormitories, garages, and other outbuildings. The two rear wings of the hotel contained a formal garden whose clipped shrubs and box hedges were growing back into natural shapes. Swaying on the topmost spray of a blue plumbago bush, a mockingbird was scolding like a jay.
I stood still and made a silencing gesture to Daly. Someone was digging on the far side of the bush. I could see some of his movements and hear the scrape of the spade, the thump of earth. I took out my gun and showed myself.
Otto Sipe looked up from his work. He was standing in a shallow hole about five feet long and two feet wide. There was dirt on his clothes. His face was muddy with sweat.
In the grass beside the hole a man in a gray jacket was lying on his back. The striped handle of a knife protruded from his chest. The man looked like Mike Harley, and he lay as if the knife had nailed him permanently to the earth.
“What are you doing, Otto?”
“Planting petunias.” He bared his teeth in a doggish grin. The man seemed to be in that detached state of drunkenness where everything appears surreal or funny.
“Planting dead men, you mean.”
He turned and looked at Harley’s body as if it had just fallen from the sky. “Did he come with you?”
“You know who he is. You and Mike have been buddies ever since he left Pocatello with you in the early forties.”
“All right, I got a right to give a buddy a decent burial. You just can’t leave them lying around in the open for the vultures.”
“The only vultures I see around here are human ones. Did you kill him?”
“Naw. Why would I kill my buddy?”
“Who did?”
Leaning on his spade, he gave me a queer cunning look.
“Where’s Tom Hillman, Otto?”
“I’m gonna save my talk for when it counts.”
I turned to Ben Daly. “Can you handle a gun?”
“Hell no, I was only at Guadal.”
“Hold this on him.”
I handed him my revolver and went to look at Harley. His face when I touched it was cold as the night had been. This and the advanced coagulation of the blood that stained his shirt front told me he had been dead for many hours, probably all night.
I didn’t try to pull the knife out of his ribs. I examined it closely without touching it. The handle was padded with rubber, striped black and white, and moulded to fit the hand. It looked new and fairly expensive.
The knife was the only thing of any value that had attached itself to Mike Harley. I went through his pockets and found the stub of a Las Vegas to Los Angeles plane ticket issued the day before, and three dollars and forty-two cents.
Ben Daly let out a yell. Several things happened at once. At the edge of my vision metal flashed and the mockingbird flew up out of the bush. The gun went off. A gash opened in the side of Daly’s head where Otto Sipe had hit him with the spade. Otto Sipe’s face became contorted. He clutched at his abdomen and fell forward, with the lower part of his body in the grave.
Ben Daly said: “I didn’t mean to shoot him. The gun went off when he swung the spade at me. After the war I never wanted to shoot anything.”
The gash in the side of his head was beginning to bleed. I tied my handkerchief around it and told him to go and call the police and an ambulance. He ran. He was surprisingly light on his feet for a man of middle age.
I was feeling suprisingly heavy on mine. I went to Sipe and turned him onto his back and opened his clothes. The wound in his belly was just below the umbilicus. It wasn’t bleeding much, externally, but he must have been bleeding inside. The life was draining visibly from his face.
It was Archer I mourned for. It had been a hard three days. All I had t
o show for them was a dead man and a man who was probably dying. The fact that the bullet in Sipe had come from my gun made it worse.
Compunction didn’t prevent me from going through Sipe’s pockets. His wallet was fat with bills, all of them twenties. But his share of the Hillman payoff wasn’t going to do him any good. He was dead before the ambulance came shrieking down the highway.
Chapter 20
A LOT OF TALKING WAS DONE, some on the scene and some in the sheriff’s office. With my support, and a phone call from Lieutenant Bastian, and the fairly nasty cut in the side of his head, Ben was able to convince the sheriff’s and the D. A.’s men that he had committed justifiable homicide. But they weren’t happy about it. Neither was I. I had let him kill my witness.
There was still another witness, if she would talk. By the middle of the morning I was back at the door of Susanna Drew’s apartment. Stella said through the door:
“Who is it, please?”
“Lew Archer.”
She let me in. The girl had bluish patches under her eyes, as if their color had run. There was hardly any other color in her face.
“You look scared,” I said. “Has anything happened?”
“No. It’s one of the things that scares me. And I have to call my parents and I don’t want to. They’ll make me go home.”
“You have to go home.”
“No.”
“Yes. Think of them for a minute. You’re putting them through a bad time for no good reason.”
“But I do have a good reason. I want to try and meet Tommy again tonight. He said if he didn’t make it last night he’d be at the bus station tonight.”
“What time?”
“The same time. Nine o’clock.”
“I’ll meet him for you.”
She didn’t argue, but her look was evasive.
“Where’s Miss Drew, Stella?”
“She went out for breakfast. I was still in bed, and she left me a note. She said she’d be back soon, but she’s been gone for at least two hours.” She clenched her fists and rapped her knuckles together in front of her. “I’m worried.”
“About Susanna Drew?”
“About everything. About me. Things keep getting worse. I keep expecting it to end, but it keeps getting worse. I’m changing, too. There’s hardly anybody I like any more.”
“The thing will end, Stella, and you’ll change back.”
“Will I? It doesn’t feel like a reversible change. I don’t see how Tommy and I are ever going to be happy.”
“Survival is the main thing.” It was a hard saying to offer a young girl. “Happiness comes in fits and snatches. I’m having more of it as I get older. The teens were my worst time.”
“Really?” Her brow puckered. “Do you mind if I ask you a personal question, Mr. Archer?”
“Go ahead.”
“Are you interested in Miss Drew? You know what I mean. Seriously.”
“I think I am. Why?”
“I don’t know whether I should tell you this or not. She went out for breakfast with another man.”
“That’s legitimate.”
“I don’t know. I didn’t actually see him but I heard his voice and I’m very good on voices. I think it was a married man.”
“How can you tell that from a man’s voice?”
“It was Tommy’s father,” she said. “Mr. Hillman.”
I sat down. For a minute I couldn’t think of anything to say. The African masks on the sunlit wall seemed to be making faces at me.
Stella approached me with an anxious expression. “Shouldn’t I have told you? Ordinarily I’m not a tattletale. I feel like a spy in her house.”
“You should have told me. But don’t tell anyone else, please.”
“I won’t.” Having passed the information on to me, she seemed relieved.
“Did the two of them seem friendly, Stella?”
“Not exactly. I didn’t see them together. I stayed in my room because I didn’t want him to see me. She wasn’t glad to have him come here, I could tell. But they did sound kind of—intimate.”
“Just what do you mean by ‘intimate’?”
She thought about her answer. “It was something about the way they talked, as if they were used to talking back and forth. There wasn’t any politeness or formality.”
“What did they say to each other?”
“Do you want me to try and tell you word for word?”
“Exactly, from the moment he came to the door.”
“I didn’t hear all of it. Anyway, when he came in, she said: ‘I thought you had more discretion than this, Ralph.’ She called him Ralph. He said: ‘Don’t give me that. The situation is getting desperate.’ I don’t know what he meant by that.”
“What do you think he meant?”
“Tommy and all, but there may have been more to it. They didn’t say. He said: ‘I thought I could expect a little sympathy from you.’ She said she was all out of sympathy, and he said she was a hard woman and then he did something—I think he tried to kiss her—and she said: ‘Don’t do that!’ ”
“Did she sound angry?”
Stella assumed a listening attitude and looked at the high ceiling. “Not so very. Just not interested. He said: ‘You don’t seem to like me very much.’ She said that the question was a complicated one and she didn’t think now was the time to go into it, especially with somebody in the guest room, meaning me. He said: ‘Why didn’t you say so in the first place? Is it a man?’ After that they lowered their voices. I don’t know what she told him. They went out for breakfast in a few minutes.”
“You have a very good memory,” I said.
She nodded, without self-consciousness. “It helps me in school, but in other ways it isn’t so fabulous. I remember all the bad things along with the good things.”
“And the conversation you heard this morning was one of the bad things?”
“Yes, it was. It frightened me. I don’t know why.”
It frightened me, too, to learn that Hillman might have been the faceless man with Susanna when she was twenty. In different degrees I cared about them both. They were people with enough feeling to be hurt, and enough complexity to do wrong. Susanna I cared about in ways I hadn’t even begun to explore.
Now the case was taking hold of her skirt like the cogs of an automated machine that nobody knew how to stop. I have to admit that I wouldn’t have stopped it even if I knew how. Which is the peculiar hell of being a pro.
“Let’s see the note she left you.”
Stella fetched it from the kitchen, a penciled note scrawled on an interoffice memo form: “Dear Stella: I am going out for breakfast and will be back soon. Help yourself to the contents of the refrig. S. Drew.”
“Did you have anything to eat?” I said to Stella.
“I drank a glass of milk.”
“And a hamburger last night for dinner. No wonder you look pinched. Come on, I’ll take you out for breakfast. It’s the going thing.”
“All right. Thank you. But then what?”
“I drive you home.”
She turned and walked to the sliding glass doors that opened onto the patio, as far away in the room as she could get from me. A little wind was blowing, and I could hear it rustling in the fronds of a miniature palm. Stella turned back to me decisively, as if the wind and the sunlight had influenced her through the glass.
“I guess I have to go home. I can’t go on scaring my mother.”
“Good girl. Now call her and tell her you’re on your way.”
She considered my suggestion, standing in the sunlight with her head down, the white straight part of her hair bisecting her brown head. “I will if you won’t listen.”
“How will I know you’ve done it?”
“I never lied to you yet,” she said with feeling. “That’s because you don’t tell lies to me. Not even for my own good.” She produced her first smile of the morning.
I think I produced mine. It had been a ba
d morning.
I immured myself in a large elaborate bathroom with fuzzy blue carpeting and did some washing, ritual and otherwise. I found a safety razor among the cosmetics and sleeping pills in the medicine cabinet, and used it to shave with. I was planning an important interview, a series of them if I could set them up.
Stella’s cheeks were flushed when I came out. “I called home. We better not stop for breakfast on the way.”
“Your mother’s pretty excited, is she?”
“Dad was the one I talked to. He blames you. I’m sorry.”
“It was my bad judgment,” I said. “I should have taken you home last night. But I had something else to do.” Get a man killed.
“It was my bad judgment,” she said. “I was punishing them for lying about Tommy and me and the car.”
“I’m glad you know that. How upset is your father?”
“Very upset. He even said something about Laguna Perdida School. He didn’t really mean it, though.” But a shadow crossed her face.
About an hour later, driving south with Stella toward El Rancho, I caught a distant glimpse of the school. The rising wind had blown away all trace of the overcast, but even in unobstructed sunlight its buildings had a desolate look about them. I found myself straining my eyes for the lonely blue heron. He wasn’t on the water or in the sky.
On impulse, I turned off the highway and took the access road to Laguna Perdida. My car passed over the treadle. The automatic gates rose.
Stella said in a tiny voice: “You’re not going to put me in here?”
“Of course not. I want to ask a certain person a question. I won’t be long.”
“They better not try to put me in here,” she said. “I’ll run away for good.”
“You’ve had more mature ideas.”
“What else can I do?” she said a little wildly.
“Stay inside the safety ropes, with your own kind of people. You’re much too young to step outside, and I don’t think your parents are so bad. They’re probably better than average.”
“You don’t know them.”
“I know you. You didn’t just happen.”
The old guard came out of his kiosk and limped up to my side of the car. “Dr. Sponti isn’t here just now.”
The Far Side of the Dollar Page 18
