The Far Side of the Dollar la-12

by Ross Macdonald

  `Why, though?'

  `He's kept it a secret all these years, even from Tom. He seems to be a little crazy on the subject.'

  `I got that impression this morning.'

  She leaned across the corner of the table and touched my fingers. 'Lew? You don't think he went off his rocker and murdered Carol himself'

  `It's a possibility, but a remote one. What was on his mind at breakfast?'

  `Him, mostly. He felt his life was collapsing around his ears. He thought I might be interested in helping him to pick up the pieces. After eighteen years he was offering me my second big break.'

  Her scorn touched herself as well as Hillman.

  `I don't quite understand.'

  `He asked me to marry him, Lew. I suppose that's in line with contemporary mores. You get your future set up ahead of time, before you terminate your present marriage.'

  `I don't like that word "terminate."

  Did he say what he intended to do with Elaine?'

  `No.'

  She looked quite pale and haunted.

  `I hope divorce was all he had in mind. What was your answer?'

  `My answer?'

  `Your response to his proposal.'

  `Oh. I told him I was waiting for a better offer.'

  Her dark meaningful eyes were on my face. I sat there trying to frame a balanced answer. The telephone rang inside before I had a chance to deliver it.

  I went in through the door we had left open and picked up the receiver. `Archer speaking.'

  `This is Dr Weintraub.'

  His voice had lost its calmness. `I've just had a thoroughly upsetting experience-'

  `Have you seen the Hillman boy?'

  `Yes. He came to me just as I was leaving. He asked me essentially the same question you did.'

  `What did you tell him, Doctor?'

  `I told him the truth. He already knew it, anyway. He wanted to know if Mike and Carol Harley were his parents. They were.'

  `How did he react to the information?'

  `Violently, I'm afraid. He hit me and broke my glasses. I'm practically blind without them. He got away from me.'

  `Have you told the police?'

  `No.'

  `Tell them, now. And tell them who he is.'

  `But his father-his adoptive father wouldn't want me-'

  `I know how it is when you're dealing with an old commander, Doctor. He was your commander at one time, wasn't he?'

  `Yes. I was his flight surgeon.'

  `You aren't any more, and you can't let Hillman do your thinking for you. Do you tell the police, or do I?'

  `I will. I realize we can't let the boy run loose in his condition.'

  Just what is his condition?'

  `He's very upset and, as I said, violently acting out.'

  With his heredity, I thought, that was hardly surprising.

  16

  I KISSED SUSANNA goodbye and drove down Wilshire through Westwood. I wanted to be at the Santa Monica bus station at nine, just in case Tom showed up, but there was still time for another crack at Ben Daly. I turned down San Vicente toward the coastal highway.

  The sun was half down on the horizon, bleeding color into the sea and the sky. Even the front of the Barcelona Hotel was touched with factitious Mediterranean pink. The crowd of onlookers in the driveway had changed and dwindled. There were still a few waiting for something more interesting than their lives to happen.

  It was a warm night, and most of them were in beach costume. One man was dressed formally in a dark gray business suit and dark gray felt hat. He looked familiar.

  I pulled up the drive on impulse and got out. The man in the dark gray suit was Harold Harley. He was wearing a black tie, which Lila had doubtless chosen for him, and a woebegone expression.

  It deepened when he saw me. `Mr. Archer?'

  `You can't have forgotten me, Harold.'

  `No. It's just that everything looks different, even people's faces. Or that hotel there. It's just a caved-in old dump, and I used to think it was a pretty ritzy place. Even the sky looks different.'

  He raised his eyes to the red-stretched sky. `It looks hand-tinted, phony, like there was nothing behind it.'

  The little man talked like an artist. He might have become one, I thought, with a different childhood.

  `I didn't realize you were so fond of your brother.'

  `Neither did I. But it isn't just that. I hate California. Nothing really good ever happened to me in California. Or Mike either.'

  He gestured vaguely toward the cluster of official cars. `I wisht I was back in Idaho.'

  I drew him away from the little group of onlookers, from the women in slacks and halters which their flesh overflowed, the younger girls with haystacks of hair slipping down their foreheads into their blue-shadowed eyes, the tanned alert looking boys with bleached heads and bleached futures. We stood under a magnolia tree that needed water.

  `What happened to your brother started in Idaho, Harold.'

  And also what happened to you, or failed to happen.

  `You think I don't know that? The old man always said Mike would die on the gallows. Anyway, he cheated the gallows.'

  `I talked to your father yesterday.'

  Harold started violently, and glanced behind him. `Is he in town?'

  `I was in Pocatello yesterday.'

  He looked both relieved and anxious. `How is he?'

  `Much the same, I gather. You didn't tell me he was one step ahead of the butterfly nets.'

  `You didn't ask me. Anyway, he isn't like that all the time.'

  `But he had to be committed more than once.'

  `Yeah.'

  He hung his head. In the final glare of day I could see the old closet dust in the groove of his hat, and the new sweat staining the hatband.

  `It's nothing to blame yourself for,' I said. `It explains a lot about Mike.'

  `I know. The old man was a terror when Mike was a kid. Maw finally had him committed for what he did to Mike and her. Mike left home and never came back, and who could blame him?'

  `But you stayed.'

  `For a while. I had a trick of pretending I was some place else, like here in California. I finally came out here and went to photography school.'

  I returned to the question that interested me. It was really a series of questions about the interlinked lives that brought Mike Harley and Carol Brown from their beginnings in Idaho to their ends in California. Their beginnings and ends had become clear enough. The middle still puzzled me, as well as the ultimate end that lay ahead in darkness.

  `I talked to Carol's parents, too,' I said. `Carol was there earlier in the summer, and she left a suitcase in her room. A letter in it explained to me why you blamed yourself for the Hillman extortion.'

  `You saw my letter, eh? I should never have written a letter like that to Mike. I should have known better.'

  He was hanging his head again.

  `It's hard to see ahead and figure what the little things we do will lead to. And you weren't intending to suggest anything wrong.'

  `Gosh, no.'

  `Anyway, your letter helped me. It led me back here to Otto Sipe, and I hope eventually to the Hillman boy. The boy was holed up here with Sipe from Monday morning till Wednesday night, last night.'

  `No kidding.'

  `How well did you know Otto Sipe?'

  Harold winced away from the question. If he could, he would have disappeared entirely, leaving his dark business suit and black tie and dusty hat suspended between the crisp brown grass and the dry leaves of the magnolia. He said in a voice that didn't want to be heard: `He was Mike's friend. I got to know him that way. He trained Mike for a boxing career.'

  `What kind of a career did he train you for, Harold?'

  `You. Didn't Sipe get you the job as hotel photographer here?'

  `On account of- I was Mike's brother.'

  `I'm sure that had something to do with it. But didn't Sipe want you to help him with his sideline?'

  `Wh
at sideline was that?'

  `Blackmail.'

  He shook his head so vehemently that his hat almost fell off. `I never had any part of the rake-off, honest. He paid me standard rates to take those pictures, a measly buck a throw, and if I didn't do it I'd lose my job. I quit anyway, as soon as I had the chance. It was a dirty business.'

  He peered up the driveway at the bland decaying face of the hotel. It was stark white now in the twilight. `I never took any benefit from it. I never even knew who the people were.'

  `Not even once?'

  `I don't know what you mean.'

  `Didn't you take a picture of Captain Hillman and his girl?'

  His face was pale and wet. `I don't know. I never knew their names.'

  `Last spring at Newport you recognized Hillman.'

  `Sure, he was the exec of Mike's ship. I met him when I went aboard that time.'

  `And no other time?'

  `No sir.'

  `When were you and Mike arrested? In the spring of 1945?'

  He nodded. `The fifth of March. I'm not likely to forget it. It was the only time I ever got arrested. After they let me go I never came back here. Until now.'

  He looked around at the place as if it had betrayed him a second time.

  `If you're telling the truth about the date, you didn't take the picture I'm interested in. It was taken in April.'

  `I'm not lying. By that time Otto Sipe had another boy.'

  `What gave him so much power around the hotel?'

  `I think he had something on the management. He hushed up something for them, long ago, something about a movie star who stayed here.'

  `Was Mike staying here at the time he was picked up?'

  `Yeah. I let him and Carol use my room, the one that went with the job. I slept in the employees' dormitory. I think Otto Sipe let Carol stay on in the room for a while after me and Mike were arrested.'

  `Was it the room next door to his, at the end of the corridor?'

  `Yeah.'

  `Did it have a brass bed in it?'

  `Yeah. Why?'

  `I was just wondering. They haven't changed the furnishings since the war. That interconnecting bathroom would have been handy for Sipe, if he liked Carol.'

  He shook his head. `Not him. He had no use for women. And Carol had no use for him. She got out of there as soon as she could make other arrangements. She went to live with a woman friend in Burbank.'

  'Susanna.'

  Harold blinked. `Yeah. That was her name, Susanna. I never met her, but she must have been a nice person.'

  `What kind of a girl was Carol?'

  `Carol? She was a beauty. When a girl has her looks, you don't think much about going deeper. I mean, there she was. I always thought she was an innocent young girl. But Lila says you could fill a book with what I don't know about women.'

  I looked at my watch. It was past eight, and Harold had probably taken me as far as he could. Partly to make sure of this, I asked him to come across the highway and see his old acquaintance, Ben Daly. He didn't hang back.

  Daly scowled at us from the doorway of his lighted office. Then he recognized Harold, and his brow cleared. He came out and shook hands with him, disregarding me.

  `Long time no see, Har.'

  `You can say that again.'

  They talked to each other across a distance of years, with some warmth and without embarrassment. There was no sign of guilty involvement between them. It didn't follow necessarily, but I pretty well gave up on the idea that either of them was involved in any way with the recent crimes.

  I broke in on their conversation: `Will you give me one minute, Ben? You may be able to help me solve that murder.'

  `How? By killing somebody else?'

  `By making another identification, if you can.'

  I brought out Dick Leandro's picture and forced it into his hand. 'Have you ever seen this man?'

  He studied the picture for a minute. His hand was unsteady. `I may have. I'm not sure.'

  `When?'

  `Last night. He may be the one who came to the hotel last night.'

  `The one with the girl, in the new blue Chevvy?'

  `Yeah. He could be the one. But I wouldn't want to swear to it in court.'

  25

  THE SANTA MONICA bus station is on a side street off lower Wilshire. At a quarter to nine I left my car at the curb and went in. Stella, that incredible child, was there. She was sitting at the lunch counter at the rear in a position from which she could watch all the doors.

  She saw me, of course, and swung around to hide her face in a cup of coffee. I sat beside her. She put down her cup with an impatient rap. The coffee in it looked cold, and had a grayish film on it.

  She spoke without looking directly at me, like somebody in a spy movie. `Go away. You'll frighten Tommy off' `He doesn't know me.'

  `But I'm supposed to be alone. Besides, you look like a policeman or something.'

  `Why is Tommy allergic to policemen?'

  `You would be, too, if they locked you up the way they locked him up.'

  `If you keep running away, they'll be locking you up, Stella.'

  `They're not going to get the chance,' she said, with a sharp sideways glance at me. `My father took me to a psychiatrist today, to see if I needed to be sent to Laguna Perdida. I told her everything, just as I've told you. She said there was nothing the matter with me at all. So when my father went in to talk to her I walked out the front door and took a taxi to the bus station, and there was a bus just leaving.'

  `I'm going to have to drive you home again.'

  She said in a very young voice: `Don't teen-agers have any rights?'

  `Yes, including the right to adult protection.'

  `I won't go without Tommy!'

  Her voice rose and broke on his name. Half the people in the small station were looking at us. The woman behind the lunch counter came over to Stella.

  `Is he bothering you, miss?'

  She shook her head. `He's a very good friend.'

  This only deepened the woman's suspicions, but it silenced her. I ordered a cup of coffee. When she went to draw it, I said to Stella: `I won't go without Tommy, either. What did your psychiatrist friend think about him, by the way?'

  `She didn't tell me. Why?'

  `I was just wondering.'

  The waitress brought my coffee. I carried it to the far end of the counter and drank it slowly. It was eight minutes to nine. People were lining up at the loading door, which meant that a bus was expected.

  I went out the front, and almost walked into Tommy. He had on slacks and a dirty white shirt. His face was a dirty white, except where a fuzz of beard showed.

  `Excuse me, sir,' he said, and stepped around me.

  I didn't want to let him get inside, where taking him would create a public scene that would bring in the police. I needed a chance to talk to him before anyone else did. There wasn't much use in trying to persuade him to come with me. He was lean and quick and could certainly outrun me.

  These thoughts went through my head in the second before he reached the door of the station. I put both arms around his waist from behind, lifted him off his feet, and carried him wildly struggling to my car. I pushed him into the front seat and got in beside him. Other cars were going by in the road, but nobody stopped to ask me any questions. They never do any more.

  Tom let out a single dry sob or whimper, high in his nose. He must have known that this was the end of running.

  `My name is Lew Archer,' I said. `I'm a private detective employed by your father.'

  `He isn't my father.'

  `An adoptive father is a father, too.'

  `Not to me he isn't. I don't want any part of Captain Hillman,' he said with the cold distance of injured youth. `Or you either.'

  I noticed a cut on the knuckle of his right hand. It had been bleeding. He put the knuckle in his mouth and sucked it, looking at me over it. It was hard to take him seriously at that moment. But he was a very serious young man.
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