The Far Side of the Dollar la-12

by Ross Macdonald

  I closed the door. `Hey, Stella.'

  Her body jerked under the blanket. Throwing it off, she sat up. She was wearing a blue sweater and a skirt. `Oh,' she said. `It's you.'

  `Who were you expecting?'

  `I don't know. But don't be cross with me. I was just dreaming something, I forget what, but it was depressing.'

  Her eyes were still dark with the dream.

  `How in the world did you get in here?'

  `The manager let me in. I told him I was a witness. He understood.'

  `I don't. A witness to what?'

  `Quite a few things,' she said with some spirit. `If you want me to tell you, you can stop treating me like a mentally retarded delinquent. Nobody else does, except my parents.'

  I sat on the edge of the studio couch beside her. I liked the girl but at the moment she was an obstruction, and could turn into a serious embarrassment. `Do your parents know you're here?'

  `Of course not. How could I tell them? They wouldn't have let me come, and I had to come. You ordered me to get in touch with you if I ever heard from Tommy. Your answering service couldn't find you and finally they gave me your home address.'

  `Are you telling me you've heard from him?'

  She nodded. Her eyes held steady on my face. They were brimming with complex feelings, more womanly than girlish. `He phoned around four o'clock this afternoon. Mother was at the store, and I had a chance to answer the phone myself.'

  `Where was he, did he say?'

  `Here in-' She hesitated. `He made me promise not to tell anyone. And I've already broken my promise once.'

  `How did you do that?'

  `I put a little note in Mr. Hillman's mailbox, before I left El Rancho. I couldn't just leave him dangling, when I knew.'

  `What did you tell him?'

  `Just that I'd heard from Tommy, and he was alive.'

  `It was a kind thing to do.'

  `But it broke my promise. He said I wasn't to tell anyone, especially not his parents.'

  `Promises have to be broken sometimes, when there are higher considerations.'

  `What do you mean?'

  `His safety. I've been afraid that Tom was dead. Are you absolutely certain you talked to him?'

  `I'm not telling a lie.'

  `I mean, you're sure it wasn't an imposter, or a tape recording?'

  `I'm sure. We talked back and forth.'

  `Where was he calling from?'

  `I don't know, but I think it was long distance.'

  `What did he say?'

  She hesitated again, with her finger raised. `Is it all right for me to tell you, even after I promised?'

  `It would be all wrong if you didn't. You know that, don't you? You didn't come all the way here to hold it back.'

  `No.'

  She smiled a little. `He didn't tell me too much. He didn't say a word about the kidnappers. Anyway, the fact that he's alive is the important thing. He said he was sorry I'd been worried about him, but he couldn't help it. Then he asked me to meet him and bring some money.'

  I was relieved. Tom's need for money implied that he had no part of the payoff. `How much money?'

  `As much as I could get hold of in a hurry. He knew it wouldn't amount to a great deal. I borrowed some from the people at the beach club. The secretary of the club gave me a hundred dollars of her own money - she knows I'm honest. I took a taxi to the bus station. You know, I never rode on a bus before, except the school bus.'

  I cut in impatiently: `Did you meet him here in Los Angeles?'

  `No. I was supposed to meet him in the Santa Monica bus station at nine o'clock. The bus was a few minutes late, and I may have missed him. He did say on the phone that he mightn't be able to make it tonight. In which case I was to meet him tomorrow night. He said he generally only goes out at night.'

  `Did he tell you where he's staying?'

  `No. That's the trouble. I hung around the bus station for about an hour and then I tried to phone you and when I couldn't I took a taxi here. I had to spend the night somewhere.'

  `So you did. It's too bad Tom didn't think of that.'

  `He probably has other things on his mind,' she said in a defensive tone. `He's been having a terrible time.'

  `Did he say so?'

  `I could tell by the way he talked to me. He sounded - I don't know - so upset.'

  `Emotionally upset, or just plain scared?'

  Her brow knit. `More worried than scared. But he wouldn't say what about. He wouldn't tell me anything that happened. I asked him if he was okay, you know, physically okay, and he said he was. So I asked him why he didn't come home. He said on account of his parents, only he didn't call them his parents. He called them his anti-parents. He said they could probably hardly wait to put him back in Laguna Perdida School.'

  Her eyes were very dark. `I remember now what I was dreaming before you woke me up. Tommy was in that school and they wouldn't let him out and they wouldn't let me see him. I went around to all the doors and windows, trying to get in. All I could see was the terrible faces leering at me through the windows.'

  `The faces aren't so terrible. I was there.'

  `Yes, but you weren't locked up there. Tommy says it's a terrible place. His parents had no right to put him there. I don't blame him for staying away.'

  `Neither do I, Stella. But, under the circumstances, he has to be brought in. You understand that, don't you?'

  `I guess I do.'

  `It would be a rotten anticlimax if something happened to him now. You don't want that.'

  She shook her head.

  `Then will you help me get him?'

  `It's why I came here, really. I couldn't sic the police on him. But you're different.'

  She touched the back of my hand. `You won't let them put him back in Laguna Perdida.'

  `It won't happen if I can possibly help it. I think I can. If Tom needs treatment, he should be able to get it as an outpatient.'

  `He isn't sick!'

  `His father must have had a reason for putting him there. Something happened that Sunday, he wouldn't tell me what.'

  `It happened long before that Sunday,' she said. `His father turned against him, that's what happened. Tommy isn't the hairy-chested type, and he preferred music to trap-shooting and sailing and such things. So his father turned against him. It's as simple as that.'

  `Nothing ever is, but we won't argue. If you'll excuse me for a minute, Stella, I have to make a phone call.'

  The phone was on the desk under the window. I sat down there and dialed Susanna Drew's unlisted number. She answered on the first ring.

  `Hello.'

  'Lew Archer. You sound very alert for three o'clock in the morning.

  `I've been lying awake thinking, about you among other things and people. Somebody said - I think it was Scott Fitzgerald - something to the effect that in the real dark night of the soul it's always three o'clock in the morning. I have a reverse twist on that. At three o'clock in the morning it's always the real dark night of the soul.'

  `The thought of me depresses you?'

  `In certain contexts it does. In others, not.'

  `You're talking in riddles, Sphinx.'

  `I mean to be, Oedipus. But you're not the source of my depression. That goes back a long way.'

  `Do you want to tell me about it?'

  `Another time, doctor.'

  Her footwork was very skittish. `You didn't call me at this hour for snatches of autobiography.'

  `No, though I'd still like to know who that telephone call was from the other day.'

  `And that's why you called me?'

  There was disappointment in her voice, ready to turn into anger.

  `It isn't why I called you. I need your help.'

  `Really?'

  She sounded surprised, and rather pleased. But she said guardedly: `You mean by telling you all I know and like that?'

  'We don't have time. I think this case is breaking. Anyway I have to make a move, now. A very nice high-school
girl named Stella has turned up on my doorstep.'

  I was speaking to the girl in the room as well as to the woman on the line; as I did so, I realized that they were rapidly becoming my favorite girl and woman. `I need a safe place to keep her for the rest of the night.'

  `I'm not that safe.'

  A rough note in her voice suggested that she meant it.

  Stella said quickly behind me: `I could stay here.'

  `She can't stay here. Her parents would probably try to hang a child-stealing rap on me.'

  `Are you serious?'

  `The situation is serious, yes.'

  `All right. Where do you live?'

  'Stella and I will come there. We're less than half an hour from you at this time of night.'

  Stella said when I hung up: `You didn't have to do it behind my back.'

  `I did it right in front of your face. And I don't have time to argue.'

  To underline the urgency I took off my jacket, got my gun and its harness out of the drawer, and put it on in front of her. She watched me with wide eyes. The ugly ritual didn't quite silence her.

  `But I didn't want to meet anybody tonight.'

  `You'll like Susanna Drew. She's very stylish and hep.'

  `But I never do like people when adults tell me I will.'

  After the big effort of the night, she was relapsing into childishness. I said, to buck her up: `Forget your war with the adults. You're going to be an adult pretty soon yourself. Then who will you have to blame for everything?'

  `That isn't fair.'

  It wasn't, but it held her all the way to the apartment house on Beverly Glen. Susanna came to the door in silk pajamas, not the kind anyone slept in. Her hair was brushed. She hadn't bothered with makeup. Her face was extraordinarily and nakedly handsome, with eyes as real and dark as any night.

  `Come in, Lew. It's nice to see you, Stella. I'm Susanna. I have a bed made up for you upstairs.'

  She indicated the indoor balcony which hung halfway up the wall of the big central studio, and on which an upstairs room opened. `Do you want something to eat?'

  `No, thank you,' Stella said. `I had a hamburger at the bus station.'

  `I'll be glad to make you a sandwich.'

  `No. Really. I'm not hungry.'

  The girl looked pale and a little sick.

  `Would you like to go to bed then?'

  `I have no choice.'

  Stella heard herself, and added: `That was rude, wasn't it? I didn't mean it to be. It's awfully kind of you to take me in. It was Mr. Archer who gave me no choice.'

  `I had no choice, either,' I said. `What would you do if you had one?'

  `I'd be with Tommy, wherever he is.'

  Her mouth began to work, and so did the delicate flesh around her eyes and mouth. The mask of a crying child seemed to be struggling for possession of her face. She ran away from it, or from our eyes, up the circular stairs to the balcony.

  Susanna called after her before she closed the door. `Pajamas on the bed, new toothbrush in the bathroom.'

  `You're an efficient hostess,' I said.

  `Thank you. Have a drink before you go.'

  `It wouldn't do anything for me.'

  `Do you want to go into where you're going and what you have to do?'

  `I'm on my way to the Barcelona Hotel, but I keep running into detours.'

  She reacted more sharply than she had any apparent reason to. `Is that what I am, a detour?'

  'Stella was the detour. You're the United States Cavalry.'

  `I love your imagery.'

  She made a face. `What on earth are you planning to do at the old Barcelona? Isn't it closed down?'

  `There's at least one man living there, a watchman who used to be the hotel detective, named Otto Sipe.'

  `Good Lord, I think I know him. Is he a big red-faced character with a whisky breath?'

  `That's probably the man. How do you happen to know him?'

  She hesitated before she answered, in a careful voice: `I sort of frequented the Barcelona at one time, way back at the end of the war. That was where I met Carol.'

  `And Mr. Sipe.'

  `And Mr. Sipe.'

  She wouldn't tell me any more.

  `You have no right to cross-question me,' she said finally. `Leave me alone.'

  `I'll be glad to.'

  She followed me to the door. `Don't leave on that note. Please.

  I'm not holding back for the fun of it. Why do you think I've been lying awake all night?'

  `Guilt?'

  `Nonsense. I'm not ashamed of anything.'

  But there was shame in her eyes, deeper than her knowledge of herself. `Anyway, the little I know can't be of any importance.'

  `You're not being fair. You're trying to use my personal feeling for you-' `I didn't know it existed. If it does, I ought to have a right to use it any way I need to.'

  `You don't have that right, though. My privacy is a very precious thing to me, and you have no right to violate it.'

  `Even to save a life?'

  Stella opened her door and came out on the balcony. She looked like a young, pajamaed saint in a very large niche.

  `If you adults,' she said, `will lower your voices a few decibels, it might be possible to get a little sleep.'

  `Sorry,' I said to both of them.

  Stella retreated. Susanna said: `Whose life is in danger, Lew?'

  `Tom Hillman's for one. Possibly others, including mine.'

  She touched the front of my jacket. `You're wearing a shoulder holster. Is Otto Sipe one of the kidnappers?'

  I countered with a question: `Was he a man in your life?'

  She was offended. `Of course not. Go away now.'

  She pushed me out. `Take care.'

  The night air was chilly on my face.

  19

  TRAFFIC WAS SPARSE on the coastal highway. Occasional night-crawling trucks went by, blazing with red and yellow lights. This stretch of highway was an ugly oil-stained place, fouled by petroleum fumes and rubbed barren by tires. Even the sea below it had a used-dishwater odor.

  Ben Daly's service station was dark, except for an inside bulb left on to discourage burglars. I left my car in his lot, beside an outside telephone booth, and crossed the highway to the Barcelona Hotel.

  It was as dead as Nineveh. In the gardens behind the main building a mockingbird tried a few throbbing notes, like a tiny heart of sound attempting to beat, and then subsided. The intermittent mechanical movement of the highway was the only life in the inert black night.

  I went up to the front door where the bankruptcy notice was posted and knocked on the glass with my flashlight. I knocked repeatedly, and got no answer. I was about to punch out a pane of glass and let myself in. Then I noticed that the door was unlocked. It opened under my hand.

  I entered the lobby, jostling a couple of ghosts. They were Susanna, twenty years old, and a man without a face. I told them to get the hell out of my way.

  I went down the corridor where Mr. Sipe had first appeared with his light, past the closed, numbered doors, to a door at the end which was standing slightly ajar. I could hear breathing inside the dark room, the heavy sighing breathing of a man in sleep or stupor. The odor of whisky was strong.

  I reached inside the door and found the light switch with my right hand. I turned it on and shifted my hand to my gun butt. There was no need. Sipe was lying on the bed, fully clothed, with his ugly nostrils glaring and his loose mouth sighing at the ceiling. He was alone.

  There was hardly space for anyone else. The room had never been large, and it was jammed with stuff which looked as if it had been accumulating for decades. Cartons and packing cases, piles of rugs, magazines and newspapers, suitcases and footlockers, were heaped at the back of the room almost to the ceiling. On the visible parts of the walls were pictures of young men in boxing stance, interspersed with a few girlie pictures.

  Empty whisky bottles were ranged along the wall beside the door. A half-full bottle stood by the bed wher
e Sipe was lying. I turned the key that was in the lock of the door and took a closer look at the sleeping man.