“How about Mrs. Mallow?”
“Yeah. You’ll find her down the line in East Hall.” He pointed toward the building with the ungenerous windows.
Leaving Stella in the car, I knocked on the front door of East Hall. After what seemed a long time, Mrs. Mallow answered. She was wearing the same dark formal costume that she had been wearing on Monday, and the same rather informal smell of gin.
She smiled at me, at the same time flinching away from the daylight. “Mr. Archer, isn’t it?”
“How are you, Mrs. Mallow?”
“Don’t even ask me that question in the morning. Or any other time, now that I come to think of it. I’m surviving.”
“Good.”
“But you didn’t come here to inquire after my health.”
“I’d like to have a few minutes with Fred Tyndal.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, “the boys are all in class.”
“It could be important.”
“You want to ask Fred some questions, is that it?”
“Just one, really. It wouldn’t have to take long.”
“And it won’t be anything disturbing?”
“I don’t think so.”
She left me in the lounge and went into Patch’s office to make a telephone call. I wandered around the big battered homeless room, imagining how it would feel to be a boy whose parents had left him here. Mrs. Mallow came back into the room:
“Fred will be right over.”
While I was waiting, I listened to the story of her marriages, including the one that had lasted, her marriage to the bottle. Then Fred came in out of the sunlight, none of which adhered to him. He sort of loitered just inside the door, pulling at the hairs on his chin and waiting to be told what he had done wrong this time.
I got up and moved toward him, not too quickly. “Hello, Fred.”
“Hello.”
“You remember the talk we had the other day?”
“There’s nothing the matter with my memory.” He added with his quick evanescent smile: “You’re Lew Archer the First. Did you find Tom yet?”
“Not yet. I think you can help me find him.”
He scuffed the door frame with the side of his shoe. “I don’t see how.”
“By telling me everything you know. One thing I can promise—they won’t put him back in here.”
“What good will that do me?” he said forlornly.
I had no answer ready. After a moment the boy said: “What do you want me to tell you?”
“I think you were holding back a little the other day. I don’t blame you. You didn’t know me from Adam. You still don’t, but it’s three days later now, and Tom is still missing.”
His face reflected the seriousness of this. He couldn’t stand such seriousness for very long. He said with a touch of parody:
“Okay, I’ll talk, I’ll spill everything.”
“I want to ask you this. When Tom broke out of here Saturday night, did he have any definite person or place in mind that he intended to go to?”
He ducked his head quickly in the affirmative. “Yeah, I think so.”
“Do you know where he was going?”
“Tom didn’t say. He did say something else, though, something about finding his true father.” The boy’s voice broke through into feeling he couldn’t handle. He said: “Big deal.”
“What did he mean by that, Fred?”
“He said he was adopted.”
“Was he really?”
“I don’t know. A lot of the kids here want to think they’re adopted. My therapist calls it a typical Freudian family romance.”
“Do you think Tom was serious?”
“Sure he was.” Once again the boy’s face reflected seriousness, and I caught a glimpse there of the maturity that he might reach yet. “He said he couldn’t know who he was until he knew for sure who his father was.” He grinned wryly. “I’m trying to forget who my father is.”
“You can’t.”
“I can try.”
“Get interested in something else.”
“There isn’t anything else.”
“There will be.”
“When?” he said.
Mrs. Mallow interrupted us. “Have you found out what you need to know, Mr. Archer? Fred really should be going back to class now.”
I said to him: “Is there anything else you can tell me?”
“No, sir. Honestly. We didn’t talk much.”
The boy started out. He turned in the doorway suddenly, and spoke to me in a voice different from the one he had been using, a voice more deep and measured:
“I wish you were my father.”
He turned away into the bleak sunlight.
Back in the car, I said to Stella: “Did Tom ever tell you that he was adopted?”
“Adopted? He can’t be.”
“Why not?”
“He can’t be, that’s all.” The road curved around a reedy marsh where the red-winged blackbirds sounded like woodwinds tuning up, and violins. Stella added after a while: “For one thing, he looks like his father.”
“Adopted children often do. They’re picked to match the parents.”
“How awful. How commercial. Who told you he was adopted?”
“He told a friend at the school.”
“A girl?”
“A boy.”
“I’m sure he was making it up.”
“Did he often make things up?”
“Not often. But he did—he does have some funny ideas about some things. He told me just this summer that he was probably a changeling, you know? That they got him mixed up with some other baby in the hospital, and Mr. and Mrs. Hillman weren’t his real parents.” She turned toward me, crouching on the seat with her legs under her. “Do you think that could be true?”
“It could be. Almost anything can happen.”
“But you don’t believe it.”
“I don’t know what I believe, Stella.”
“You’re an adult,” she said with a hint of mockery. “You’re supposed to know.”
I let it drop. We rode in silence to the gate of El Rancho. Stella said:
“I wonder what my father is going to do to me.” She hesitated. “I apologize for getting you into this.”
“It’s all right. You’ve been the best help I’ve had.”
Jay Carlson, whom I hadn’t met and wasn’t looking forward to meeting, was standing out in front of his house when we got there. He was a well-fed, youngish man with sensitive blue eyes resembling Stella’s. At the moment he looked sick with anger, gray and shuddering with it.
Rhea Carlson, her red hair flaring like a danger signal, came out of the house and rushed up to the car, with her husband trudging behind her. He acted like a man who disliked trouble and couldn’t handle it well. The woman spoke first:
“What have you been doing with my daughter?”
“Protecting her as well as I could. She spent the night with a woman friend of mine. This morning I talked her into coming home.”
“I intend to check that story very carefully,” Carlson said. “What was the name of this alleged woman friend?”
“Susanna Drew.”
“Is he telling the truth, Stella?”
She nodded.
“Can’t you talk?” he cried. “You’ve been gone all night and you won’t even speak to us.”
“Don’t get so excited, Daddy. He’s telling the truth. I’m sorry I went to Los Angeles but—”
He couldn’t wait for her to finish. “I’ve got a right to get excited, after what you’ve done. We didn’t even know if you were alive.”
Stella bowed her head. “I’m sorry, Daddy.”
“You’re a cruel, unfeeling girl,” her mother said. “And I’ll never be able to believe you again. Never.”
“You know better than that, Mrs. Carlson.”
Her husband turned on me fiercely. “You stay out of it.” He probably wanted to hit me. In lieu of this, he grasped Stella by
the shoulders and shook her. “Are you out of your mind, to do a thing like this?”
“Lay off her, Carlson.”
“She’s my daughter!”
“Treat her like one. Stella’s had a rough night—”
“She’s had a rough night, has she? What happened?”
“She’s been trying to grow up, under difficulties, and you’re not giving her much help.”
“What she needs is discipline. And I know where she can get it.”
“If you’re thinking of Laguna Perdida, your thinking is way out of line. Stella is one of the good ones, one of the best—”
“I’m not interested in your opinion. I suggest you get off my place before I call the police.”
I left them together, three well-intentioned people who couldn’t seem to stop hurting each other. Stella had the courage to lift her hand to me in farewell.
Chapter 21
I WENT NEXT DOOR to the Hillmans’. Turning in past their mailbox, I heard the noise of a sports car coming down the driveway. I stopped in the middle of the narrow blacktop so that Dick Leandro had to stop, too.
He sat there looking at me rather sulkily from under his hair, as if I’d halted him in the middle of a Grand Prix. I got out and walked over to the side of his car and patted the hood.
“Nice car.”
“I like it.”
“You have any other cars?”
“Just this one,” he said. “Listen, I hear they f-found Tom, is that the true word?”
“He hasn’t been found yet, but he is running free.”
“Hey, that’s great,” he said without enthusiasm. “Listen, do you know where Skipper is? Mrs. Hillman says he hasn’t been home all night.” He looked up at me with puzzled anxiety.
“I wouldn’t worry about him. He can look after himself.”
“Yeah, sure, but do you know where he is? I want to ta-talk to him.”
“What about?”
“That’s between him and I. It’s a personal matter.”
I said unpleasantly: “Do you and Mr. Hillman share a lot of secrets?”
“I w-wouldn’t say that. He advises me. He gives me g-good advice.”
The young man was almost babbling with fear and hostility. I let him go and drove up to the house. Elaine Hillman was the one I wanted to see, and she let me in herself.
She looked better than she had the last time I’d seen her. She was well groomed and well dressed, in a tailored sharkskin suit which concealed the shrinkage of her body. She was even able to smile at me.
“I got your good news, Mr. Archer.”
“Good news?” I couldn’t think of any.
“That Tom is definitely alive. Lieutenant Bastian passed the word to me. Come in and tell me more.”
She led me across the reception hall, making a detour to avoid the area under the chandelier, and into the sitting room. She said almost brightly, as if she was determined to be cheerful:
“I call this the waiting room. It’s like a dentist’s waiting room. But the waiting is almost over, don’t you think?” Her voice curled up thinly at the end, betraying her tension.
“Yes. I really think so.”
“Good. I couldn’t stand much more of this. None of us could. These days have been very difficult.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. You’ve brought us good news.” She perched on the chesterfield. “Now sit down and tell me the rest of it.”
I sat beside her. “There isn’t much more, and not all of it is good. But Tom is alive, and free, and very likely still in Los Angeles. I traced him from the Barcelona Hotel, where he was hiding, to downtown Los Angeles. He was seen getting off a bus in the main station around ten o’clock last night. I’m going back there this afternoon to see if I can find him.”
“I wish my husband was here to share this,” she said. “I’m a little worried about him. He left the house early last evening and hasn’t been back since.” She looked around the room as if it felt strange without him.
I said: “He probably got word that Tom was alive.”
“From whom?”
I left the question unanswered.
“But he wouldn’t go without telling me.”
“Not unless he had a reason.”
“What possible reason could he have for keeping me in the dark?”
“I don’t know, Mrs. Hillman.”
“Is he going out of his mind, do you think?”
“I doubt it. He probably spent the night in Los Angeles searching for Tom. I know he had breakfast this morning with Susanna Drew.”
I’d dropped the name deliberately, without preparation, and got the reaction I was looking for. Elaine’s delicate blonde face crumpled like tissue paper. “Good Lord,” she said, “is that still going on? Even in the midst of these horrors?”
“I don’t know exactly what is going on.”
“They’re lovers,” she said bitterly, “for twenty years. He swore to me it was over long ago. He begged me to stay with him, and gave me his word of honor that he would never go near her again. But he has no honor.” She raised her eyes to mine. “My husband is a man without honor.”
“He didn’t strike me that way.”
“Perhaps men can trust him. I know a woman can’t. I’m rather an expert on the subject. I’ve been married to him for over twenty-five years. It wasn’t loyalty that kept him with me. I know that. It was my family’s money, which has been useful to him in his business, and in his hobbies. Including,” she added in a disgusted tone, “his dirty little bed-hopping hobby.”
She covered her mouth with her hand, as if to hide the anguish twisting it. “I shouldn’t be talking this way. It isn’t like me. It’s very much against my New England grain. My mother, who had a similar problem with my father, taught me by precept and example always to suffer in silence. And I have. Except for Ralph himself, you’re the only person I’ve spoken to about it.”
“You haven’t told me much. It might be a good idea to ventilate it.”
“Do you believe it may be connected in some way with—all this?” She flung out her arm, with the fingers spread at the end of it.
“Very likely it is. I think that’s why your husband and Miss Drew got together this morning. He probably phoned her early in the week. Tuesday afternoon.”
“He did! I remember now. He was phoning from the bar, and I came into the room. He cut it short. But I heard him say something to the effect that they must absolutely keep quiet. It must have been that Drew woman he was talking to.”
The scornful phrase made me wince. It was a painful, strange colloquy, but we were both engrossed in it. The intimacy of the people we were talking about forced intimacy on us.
“It probably was her,” I said. “I’d just told Lieutenant Bastian that she was a witness, and Bastian must have passed it on to your husband.”
“You’re right again, Mr. Archer. My husband had just heard from the lieutenant. How can you possibly know so much about the details of other people’s lives?”
“Other people’s lives are my business.”
“And your passion?”
“And my passion. And my obsession, too, I guess. I’ve never been able to see much in the world besides the people in it.”
“But how could you possibly find out about that phone call? You weren’t here. My husband wouldn’t tell you.”
“I was in Miss Drew’s apartment when the call came. I didn’t hear what was said, but it shook her up.”
“I hope so.” She glanced at my face, and her eyes softened. She reached out and touched my arm with gentle fingers. “She isn’t a friend of yours?”
“She is, in a way.”
“You’re not in love with her?”
“Not if I can help it.”
“That’s a puzzling answer.”
“It puzzles me, too. If she’s still in love with your husband it would tend to chill one’s interest. But I don’t think she is.”
&
nbsp; “Then what are they trying to conceal?”
“Something in the past.” I hoped it was entirely in the past. Susanna, I had learned in the course of the morning, could still hurt me where I lived. “It would help if you’d go into it a little deeper. I know it will also hurt,” I said to myself and her.
“I can stand pain if there’s any purpose in it. It’s the meaningless pain I can’t stand. The pain of Tom, for instance.” She didn’t explain what she meant, but she touched her blue-veined temple with her fingertips.
“I’ll try to make it short, Mrs. Hillman. You said the affair has been going on for twenty years. That would take it back to around the end of the war.”
“Yes. The spring of 1945. I was living alone, or rather with a woman companion, in a house in Brentwood. My husband was in the Navy. He had been a squadron commander, but at the time I’m talking about he was executive officer of an escort carrier. Later they made him captain of the same ship.” She spoke with a kind of forlorn pride, and very carefully, as if the precise facts of the past were all she had to hold on to.
“In January or February of 1945 my husband’s ship was damaged by a kamikaze plane. They had to bring it back to San Diego for repairs. Ralph had some days of leave, of course, and of course he visited me. But I didn’t see as much of him as I wanted to, or expected to. I found out later why. He was spending some of his nights, whole weekends, with Susanna Drew.”
“In the Barcelona Hotel?”
“Did she tell you?”
“In a way.” She had given me Harold Harley’s picture of Carol, and the printing on the back of the picture had sent me to the Barcelona Hotel. “About herself she told me, not about your husband. She’s a loyal girl, anyway.”
“I don’t want to hear her praised. She’s caused me too much suffering.”
“I’m sorry. But she was only twenty, remember.”
“She’s closer to forty now. The fact that she was twenty then only made it worse. I was still in my twenties myself, but my husband had already discarded me. Do you have any idea how a woman feels when her husband leaves her for a younger woman? Can you imagine the crawling of the flesh?”
She was suffering intense remembered pain. Her eyes were bright and dry, as if there was fire behind them. The cheerfullest thing I could think of to say was:
The Far Side of the Dollar Page 19
