The Far Side of the Dollar la-12

by Ross Macdonald

  `How did his real mother feel about it?'

  `She didn't want him,' he said.

  `Wasn't she married?'

  `As a matter of fact, she was a young married woman. Neither she nor her husband wanted a child at that time.'

  `Are you willing to tell me their name?'

  `It wouldn't be professional, Mr. Archer.'

  `Not even to help solve a crime, or find a missing boy?'

  `I'd have to know all the facts, and then have time to consider them. I don't have time. I'm stealing time from my other-from my patients now.'

  `You haven't heard from Thomas Hillman this week?'

  `Neither this week nor any other time.'

  He got up bulkily and moved past me to the door, where he waited with courteous impatience till I went out past him.

  23

  WITH ITS PORTICO supported by fluted columns, the front of Susanna's apartment house was a cross between a Greek temple and a Southern plantation mansion. It was painted blue instead of white. Diminished by the columns, I went into the cold marble lobby. Miss Drew was out. She had been out all day.

  I looked at my watch. It was nearly five. The chances were she had gone to work after her breakfast with Hillman. I went out and sat in my car at the curb and watched the rush-hour traffic crawling by.

  Shortly after five a yellow cab veered out of the traffic stream and pulled up behind my car. Susanna got out. I went up to her as she was paying the driver. She dropped a five-dollar bill when she saw me. The driver scooped it up.

  `I've been hoping you'd come to see me, Lew,' she said without much conviction. `Do come in.'

  She had trouble fitting her key into the lock. I helped her. Her handsome central room appeared a little shabby to my eyes, like a stage set where too many scenes had been enacted. Even the natural light at the windows, the fading afternoon light, seemed stale and secondhand.

  She flung herself down on a sofa, her fine long legs sprawling. `I'm bushed. Make yourself a drink.'

  `I couldn't use one. There's a long night ahead.'

  `That sounds ominous. Make me one then. Make me a journey to the End of the Night cocktail, with a dash of henbane. Or just dip me a cup of Lethe, that will do.'

  `You're tired.'

  `I've been working all day. For men must weep and women must work, though the harbor bar be moaning.'

  `If you'll be quiet for a bit, I want to talk to you seriously.'

  `What fun.'

  `Shut up.'

  I made her a drink and brought it to her. She sipped it. `Thank you, Lew. You're really a dear man.'

  `Stop talking like a phony.'

  She looked up at me with hurt dark eyes. `Nothing I say is right. You're mad at me. Maybe I shouldn't have left Stella by herself, but she was still sleeping and I had to go to work. Anyway, she got home all right. Her father called, to thank me, just before I left the office.'

  `To thank you?'

  `And to cross-examine me about you and a few other things. Stella seems to have left home again. Mr. Carlson asked me to get in touch with him if she comes here. Should I?'

  `I don't care. Stella isn't the problem.'

  `And I am?'

  `You're part of it. You didn't leave Stella this morning because you had to go to work. You had breakfast with Ralph Hillman, and you ought to know that I know it.'

  `It was in a public place,' she said irrelevantly.

  `That's not the point. I wouldn't care if it was breakfast in bed. The point is you tried to slur over the fact, and it's a damned important fact.'

  The hurt in her eyes tried to erupt into anger, but didn't quite succeed. Anger was just another evasion, and she probably knew that she was coming to the end of her evasions. She finished her drink and said in a very poignant female voice: `Do you mean important to you personally, or for other reasons?'

  `Both. I talked to Mrs. Hillman today. Actually she did most of the talking.'

  `About Ralph and me?'

  `Yes. It wasn't a very pleasant conversation, for either of us. I'd rather have heard it from you.'

  She averted her face. Her black head absorbed the light almost completely. It was like looking into a small head-shaped area of almost total darkness.

  `It's a passage in my life that I'm not proud of.'

  `Because he was so much older?'

  `That's one reason. Also, now that I'm older myself, I know how wretchedly mean it is to try and steal another woman's husband.'

  `Then why go on doing it?'

  `I'm not!' she cried in resentment. `It was over almost as soon as it started. If Mrs. Hillman thinks otherwise, she's imagining things.'

  `I'm the one who thinks otherwise,' I said. `You had breakfast with him this morning. You had a phone call from him the other day, which you refused to discuss.'

  Slowly she turned and looked up at my face. `But it doesn't mean anything. I didn't ask him to phone me. I only went out with him this morning because he was desperate to talk to someone and I didn't want to disturb Stella. Also, if you want the truth, so he couldn't make a pass at me.'

  `Does he go in rather heavily for that?'

  `I don't know. I hadn't seen him in about eighteen years. Honestly. I was appalled by the change in him. He was in a bad way this morning. He'd been drinking, and he said he'd been up all night, wandering around Los Angeles, searching for his son.'

  `I've been doing a little searching myself, but nobody goes out to breakfast with me and holds my hand.'

  `Are you really jealous of him, Lew? You can't be. He's old. He's a broken-down old man.'

  `You're protesting too much.'

  `I mean it, though. I had an enormous sense of revulsion this morning. Not just against Ralph Hillman. Against my whole misguided little life.'

  She looked around the room as if she perceived the shabbiness I had seen. `I'm liable to spill over into my autobiography at any moment.'

  `That's what I've been waiting for, Susanna. How did you meet him?'

  `Make me another drink.'

  I made it and brought it to her. `When and how did you meet him?'

  `It was in March of 1945, when I was working at Warner's. A group of Navy officers came out to the studio to see a preview of a war movie. They were planning a party afterwards, and I went along. Ralph got me drunk and took me to the Barcelona Hotel, where he introduced me to the stolen delights of illicit romance. It was my first time on both counts. First time drunk, first time bedded.'

  Her voice was harsh. `If you wouldn't stand over me, Lew, it would be easier.'

  I pulled up a hassock to her feet. `But it didn't go on, you say?'

  `It went on for a few weeks. I'll be honest with you. I was in love with Ralph. He was handsome and brave and all the other things.'

  `And married.'

  `That's why I quit him,' she said, `essentially Mrs. Hillman. Elaine Hillman got wind of the affair and came to my apartment in Burbank. We had quite a scene. I don't know what would have happened if Carol hadn't been there. But she got the two of us quieted down, and even talking sensibly to each other.'

  She paused, and added elegiacally: `Carol had troubles of her own, but she was always good at easing situations.'

  `What was Carol doing in that situation?'

  `She was living with me, didn't I tell you that? I took her into my home. Anyway, Carol sat there like a little doll while Elaine Hillman laid out for me in detail just what I was doing to her and her marriage. The ugliness of it. I saw I couldn't go on doing it to her. I told her so, and she was satisfied. She's quite an impressive woman, you know, at least she was then.'

  `She still is, when you get under the surface. And Ralph Hillman is an impressive man.'

  `He was in those days, anyway.'

  I said to test her honesty: `Didn't you have any other reason for dropping him, besides Elaine Hillman's visit?'

  `I don't know what you mean,' she said, failing the honesty test, or perhaps the memory test.

  `How did Elaine
Hillman find out about you?'

  `Oh. That.'

  The shame that lay beneath her knowledge of herself came up into her face and took possession of it. She whispered: `Mrs. Hillman told you, I suppose?'

  `She mentioned a picture.'

  `Did she show it to you?'

  `She's too much of a lady.'

  `That was a nasty crack!'

  `It wasn't intended to be. You're getting paranoid.'

  `Yes, Doctor. Shall I stretch out on this convenient couch and tell you a dream?'

  `I can think of better uses for a couch.'

  `Not now,' she said quickly.

  `No. Not now.'

  But in the darkest part of our transaction we had reached a point of intimacy, understanding at least. `I'm sorry I have to drag all this stuff out.'

  `I know. I know that much about you. I also know you haven't finished.'

  `Who took the picture? Otto Sipe?'

  `He was there. I heard his voice.'

  `You didn't see him?'

  `I hid my face,' she said. `A flashbulb popped. It was like reality exploding.'

  She passed her hand over her eyes. `I think it was another man in the doorway who took the picture.'

  `Harold Harley?'

  `It must have been. I didn't see him.'

  `What was the date?'

  `It's in my memory book. April 14, 1945. Why does it matter?'

  `Because you can't explode reality. Life hangs together in one piece. Everything is connected with everything else. The problem is to find the connections.'

  She said with some irony: `That's your mission in life, isn't it? You're not interested in people, you're only interested in the connections between them. Like a-' she searched for an insulting word-`a plumber.'

  I laughed at her. She smiled a little. Her eyes remained somber.

  `There's another connection we have to go into,' I said. `This one involves the telephone, not the plumbing.'

  `You mean Ralph's call the other day.'

  `Yes. He wanted you to keep quiet about something. What was it?'

  She squirmed a little, and gathered her feet under her. `I don't want to get him into trouble. I owe him that much.'

  `Spare me the warmed-over sentiment. This is for real.'

  `You needn't sound so insulting.'

  `I apologize. Now let's have it.'

  `Well, he knew you had seen me, and he said we had to keep our stories straight. It seems there was a discrepancy in the story he told you. He told you he hadn't met Carol, but actually he had. After Mike Harley was arrested, she made an appeal to him and he did what he could. I wasn't to tell you about his interest in Carol.'

  `He was interested in Carol?'

  `Not in the way you mean,' she said with a lift of her head. `I was his girl. He simply didn't like the idea of leaving a child bride like Carol alone in the Barcelona Hotel. He asked me to take her under my wing. My slightly broken wing. Which I did, as you know.'

  `It all sounds very innocent.'

  `It was. I swear it. Besides, I liked Carol, I loved her, that summer in Burbank. I felt as if the baby in her womb belonged to both of us.'

  `Have you ever had a child?'

  She shook her head rather sadly. `I never will have now. I was sure I was pregnant once, that very spring we've been talking about, but the doctor said it was false, caused by wistful thinking.'

  `Was Carol seeing a doctor when she lived with you?'

  `Yes, I made her go. She went to the same doctor, actually. Weintraub, his name was.'

  `Did he deliver her baby?'

  `I wouldn't know. She'd already left me, remember, and gone off with Mike Harley. And I didn't go back to Dr Weintraub on account of the unpleasant associations.'

  `Was he unpleasant to you?'

  `I mean the association with Ralph Hillman. Ralph sent me to Dr Weintraub. I think they were buddies in the Navy.'

  Dr Weintraub's plump face came into my mind. At the same time I remembered where I had seen a younger version of it, stripped of excess flesh, that very day. Weintraub was a member of the group on the flight deck, in the picture hanging on Hillman's library wall.

  `It's funny,' Susanna was saying, `how a name you haven't heard for seventeen or eighteen years will crop up, and then a couple of hours or a couple of days later, it will crop up again. Like Weintraub.'

  `Has the name been cropping up in other contexts?'

  `Just this afternoon at the office. I had a rather peculiar caller whom I meant to tell you about, but all these other matters pushed him out of my mind. He was interested in Dr Weintraub, too.'

  `Who was he?'

  `He didn't want to say. When I pressed him, he said his name was Jackman.'

  `Sam Jackman?'

  `He didn't mention his first name.'

  `Sam Jackman is a middle-aged Negro with very light skin who looks and talks like a jazz musician on his uppers, which he is.'

  `This boy seemed to be on his uppers, all right, but he certainly isn't Sam's. Maybe he's Sam son. He can't be more than eighteen or nineteen.'

  `Describe him.'

  `Thin-faced, very good features, very intense dark eyes, so intense he scared me a little. He seemed intelligent, but he was too excited to make much sense.'

  `What was he excited about?'

  I said with a mounting excitement of my own.

  `Carol's death, I think. He didn't refer to it directly, but he asked me if I had known Carol in 1945. Apparently he'd been all the way out to Burbank trying to find me. He came across an old secretary at Warner's whom I still keep in touch with, and used her name to get past my secretary: He wanted to know what I could tell him about the Harley baby, and when I couldn't tell him anything he asked me what doctor Carol had gone to. I dredged up Weintraub's name - Elijah Weintraub isn't exactly a forgettable name - and it satisfied him. I was quite relieved to get rid of him.'

  `I'm sorry you did.'

  She looked at me curiously. `Do you suppose he could be the Harley baby himself?'

  I didn't answer her. I got out my collection of photographs and shuffled them. There was an electric tremor in my hands, as if time was short-circuiting through me.

  Susanna whispered fearfully: `He isn't dead, is he, Lew? I couldn't bear to look at another dead picture.'

  `He's alive. At least, I hope he is.'

  I showed her Tom Hillman's face. She said: `That's the boy I talked to. But he's very much the worse for wear now. Is he the Harley baby?'

  `I think so. He's also the baby that Ralph and Elaine Hillman adopted through Dr Weintraub. Did you get the impression that he was on his way to see Weintraub?'

  `Yes. I did.'

  She was getting excited, too. `It's like an ancient identity myth. He's searching for his lost parentage.'

  `The hell of it is, both of his parents are dead. What time did you see him?'

  `Around four o'clock.'

  It was nearly six now. I went to the phone and called Weintraub's office. His answering service said it was closed for the night. The switchboard girl wouldn't give me Weintraub's home address or his unlisted number, and neither would the manager of the answering service. I had to settle for leaving my name and Susanna's number and waiting for Weintraub to call me, if he was willing.

  An hour went by. Susanna broiled me a steak, and chewed un-hungrily on a piece of it. We sat at a marble table in the patio and she told me all about identity myths and how they grew. Oedipus. Hamlet. Stephen Dedalus. Her father had taught courses in such subjects. It passed the time, but it didn't relieve my anxiety for the boy. Hamlet came to a bloody end. Oedipus killed his father and married his mother, and then blinded himself.

  `Thomas Harley,' I said aloud. `Thomas Harley Hillman Jackman. He knew he wasn't the Hillmans' son. He thought he was a changeling.'

  `You get that in the myths, too.'

  `I'm talking about real life. He turned on his foster parents and went for his real parents. It's too bloody bad they had to be the Harley
s.'

  `You're very certain that he is the Harley child.'

  `It fits in with everything I know about him. Incidentally, it explains why Ralph Hillman tried to hush up the fact that he'd taken an interest in Carol. He didn't want the facts of the adoption to come out.'