The Far Side of the Dollar la-12

by Ross Macdonald

  `I'm sorry, Tom. But didn't something crucial happen that Sunday morning?'

  He peered at me under his raised arm. `They told you, eh?'

  `No. I'm asking you to tell me.'

  `Ask them.'

  It was all he would say.

  I drove up the winding blacktop lane to the top of the knoll. Lights were blazing outside and inside the house. The harsh white floods made the stucco walls look ugly and unreal. Black shadows lurked under the melodramatic Moorish arches.

  There was something a little melodramatic in the way Ralph Hillman stepped out from one of the arches into the light. He wasn't the wreck Susanna had described, at least not superficially. His handsome silver head was sleekly brushed. His face was tightly composed. He held himself erect, and even trotted a few steps as he came toward my side of the car. He was wearing a wine-colored jacket with a rolled collar.

  `Prodigal son returneth,' Tom was saying beside me in scared bravado. `But they didn't kill the fatted calf, they killed the prodigal son.'

  Hillman said: `I thought you were Lieutenant Bastian.'

  `Are you expecting him?'

  `Yes. He says he has something to show me.'

  He stooped to look in the window and saw Tom. His eyes dilated.

  `My boy!'

  His hoarse, whisky-laden voice hardly dared to believe what it was saying. `You've come back.'

  `Yeah. I'm here.'

  Hillman trotted around to the other side of the car and opened the door. `Come out and let me look at you.'

  With a brief, noncommittal glance in my direction, Tom climbed out. His movements were stiff and tentative, like a much older man's. Hillman put his hands on the boy's shoulders and held him at arm's length, turning him so that his face was in the light.

  `How are you, Tom?'

  `I'm okay. How are you?'

  `Wonderful, now that you're here.'

  I didn't doubt that Hillman's feeling was sincere, but his expression of it was somehow wrong. Phony. And I could see Tom wince under his hands.

  Elaine Hillman came out of the house. I went to meet her. The floodlights multiplied the lines in her face and leached it of any color it might have had. She was pared so thin that she reminded me vaguely of concentration camps. Her eyes were brilliantly alive.

  `You've brought him back, Mr. Archer. Bless you.'

  She slipped her hand through my arm and let me take her to him. He stood like a dutiful son while she stood on her toes and kissed him on his grimy tear-runneled cheek.

  Then he backed away from both of them. He stood leaning against the side of my car with his thumbs in the waistband of his slacks. I'd seen a hundred boys standing as he was standing against cars both hot and cold, on the curb of a street or the shoulder of a highway, while men in uniform questioned them. The sound of the distant highway faintly disturbed the edges of the silence I was listening to now.

  Tom said: `I don't want to hurt anybody. I never did. Or maybe I did, I don't know. Anyway, there's no use going on pretending. You see, I know who I am. Mike and Carol Harley were my father and mother. You knew it, too, didn't you?'

  `I didn't,' Elaine said quickly.

  `But you knew you weren't my mother.'

  `Yes. Of course I knew that.'

  She glanced down at her body and then, almost wistfully, at her husband. He turned away from both of them. His face had momentarily come apart. He seemed to be in pain, which he wanted to hide.

  `One of you must have known who I really was.'

  Tom said to Hillman: `You knew, didn't you?'

  Hillman didn't answer. Tom said in a high desperate voice: `I can't stay here. You're both a couple of phonies. You put on a big act for all these years, and as soon as I step out of line you give me the shaft.'

  Hillman found his voice. `I should think it was the other way around.'

  `Okay, so I did wrong. Stand me up against a wall and shoot me.'

  The boy's voice was slightly hysterical, but it wasn't that that bothered me so much. He seemed to be shifting from attitude to attitude, even from class to class, trying to find a pace where he could stand. I went and stood beside him.

  `Nobody's talking about punishing you,' Hillman said. `But a homicidal attack is something that can't be laughed off.'

  `You're talking crap,' the boy said.

  Hillman's chin came up. `Don't speak to me like that!'

  `Or what will you do? Lock me up with a bunch of psychos and throw away the key?'

  `I didn't say that.'

  `No. You just went ahead and did it.'

  `Perhaps I acted hastily.'

  `Yes,' Elaine put in. `Your father acted hastily. Now let's forget the whole thing and go inside and be friends.'

  `He isn't my father,' Tom said stubbornly.

  `But we can all be friends, anyway. Can't we, Tom?'

  Her voice and look were imploring. `Can't we forget the bad things and simply be glad they're over and that we're all together?'

  `I don't know. I'd like to go away for a while and live by myself and think things through. What would be wrong with it? I'm old enough.'

  `That's nonsense.'

  Hillman shouldn't have said it. A second later his eyes showed that he knew he shouldn't have. He stepped forward and put his hand on the boy's shoulder. `Maybe that isn't such a bad idea, after all. We're intelligent people, we ought to be able to work something out between us. There's the lodge in Oregon, for example, where you and I were planning to go next month. We could step up our schedule and synch our watches, eh?'

  The performance was forced. Tom listened to it without interest or hope. After a bit Elaine put her hand inside her husband's arm and drew him toward the house. Tom and I followed along.

  Mrs. Perez was waiting at the door. There was warmth in her greeting, and even some in Tom's response. They had a discussion about food. Tom said he would like a hamburger sandwich with pea soup. Mrs. Perez darted jouncily away.

  Hillman surveyed the boy in the light of the chandelier. `You'd better go up and bathe and change your clothes.'

  `Now?'

  `It's just a suggestion,' Hillman said placatingly. `Lieutenant Bastian of the sheriffs department is on his way over. I'd like you - you should be looking more like yourself.'

  `Is he going to take me away? Is that the idea?'

  `Not if I can help it,' Hillman said. `Look, I'll come up with you.

  `I can dress myself, Dad!'

  The word slipped out, irretrievable and undeniable.

  `But we ought to go over what you're going to say to him. There's no use putting your neck in a noose-I mean-'

  `I'll just tell him the truth.'

  The boy walked away from him toward the stairs. Ralph and Elaine Hillman followed him with their eyes until he was out of sight, and then they followed his footsteps with their ears. The difficult god of the household had returned and the household was functioning again, in its difficult way.

  We went into the sitting room. Hillman continued across it into the bar alcove. He made himself a drink, absently, as if he was simply trying to find something to do with his hands and then with his mouth.

  When we came out with the drink in his hand, he reminded me of an actor stepping out through a proscenium arch to join the audience.

  `Ungrateful sons are like a serpent's tooth,' he said, not very conversationally.

  Elaine spoke up distinctly from the chesterfield: `If you're attempting to quote from Icing Lear, the correct quotation is: "How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child!" But it isn't terribly appropriate, since Tom is not your child. A more apt quotation from the same work would be Edmund's line, "Now, gods, stand up for bastards!" ' He knocked back his drink and moved towards her, lurching just a little. `I resent your saying that.'

  `That's your privilege, and your habit.'

  `Tom is not a bastard. His parents were legally married.'

  `It hardly matters, considering their background. Did you and your
precious Dr Weintraub have to choose the offspring of criminals?'

  Her voice was cold and bitter. She seemed, after years of silence, to be speaking out and striking back at him.

  `Look,' he said, `he's back. I'm glad he's back. You are, too. And we want him to stay with us, don't we?'

  `I want what's best for him.'

  `I know what's best for him.'

  He spread his arms, swinging them a little from side to side, as if he was making Tom a gift of the house and the life that went on inside it.

  `You don't know what's best for anybody, Ralph. Having men under you, you got into the habit of thinking you knew. But you really don't. I'm interested in Mr. Archer's opinion. Come and sit here beside me,' she said to me, `and tell me what you think.'

  `What exactly is the subject?'

  I said as I sat down.

  `Tom. What kind of a future should we plan for him?'

  `I don't think you can do it for him. Let him do his own planning.'

  Hillman said across the room: `But all he wants to do is go away by himself.'

  `I admit that isn't such a good idea. We should be able to persuade him to tone it down. Let him live with another family for a year. Or send him to prep school. After that, he'll be going away to college, anyway.'

  `Good Lord, do you think he'll make it to college?'

  `Of course he will, Ralph.'

  She turned to me. `But is he ready now for any ordinary prep school? Could he survive it?'

  'He survived the last two weeks.'

  `Yes. We have to thank God for that. And you.'

  Hillman came and stood over me, shaking the ice in his glass. `Just what was the situation with those people? Was Tom in league with them against us? Understand me, I don't intend to punish him or do anything at all about it. I just want to know.'

  I answered him slowly and carefully. `You can hardly talk about a boy being in league with his mother and father. He was confused. He still is. He believed you had turned against him when you put him in Laguna Perdida School. You don't have to be a psychiatrist to know that that isn't the kind of school he needs.'

  `I'm afraid you aren't conversant with all the facts.'

  `What are they?'

  He shook his head. `Go on with what you were saying. Was he in cahoots with those people?'

  `Not in the way you mean. But they offered him an out, physically and emotionally, and he took it. Apparently his mother was kind to him.'

  `I was always kind to him,' Elaine said. She shot a fierce upward glance at her husband. `But there was falsity in the house, undermining everything.'

  I said: `There was falseness in the other house, too, at Dack's Auto Court. There's no doubt that Mike Harley was conning him, setting him up for the phony kidnapping. He didn't let his paternal feelings interfere. Carol was another matter. If she was conning Tom, she was conning herself, too. Tom put it something like this: she knew Harley was up to something, but she didn't let herself know. You get that way after twenty years of living with a man like Harley.'

  Elaine nodded slightly. I think it was a comment on her own marriage. She said. `I'm worried about Tom's heredity, with such parents.'

  The blood rushed into Hillman's face. `For God's sake, that's really reaching for trouble.'

  `I hardly need to reach for it,' she said quietly. `It's in my lap.'

  She looked at him as if he had placed it there.

  He turned and walked the length of the room, returned part way, and went into the bar. He poured more whisky over the ice in his glass, and drank it down. Elaine watched him with critical eyes, which he was aware of.

  `It settles my nerves,' he said.

  `I hadn't noticed.'

  He looked at his watch and paced up and down the room. He lost his balance once and had to make a side step.

  `Why doesn't Bastian come and get it over with?' he said. It's getting late. I was expecting Dick tonight, but I guess he found something more interesting to do.'

  He burst out at his wife: `This is a dismal household, you know that?'

  `I've been aware of it for many years. I tried to keep it together for Tom's sake. That's rather funny, isn't it?'

  `I don't see anything funny about it.'

  I didn't, either. The broken edges of their marriage were rubbing together like the unset ends of a bone that had been fractured but was still living.

  Bastian arrived at last. He came into the reception hall carrying a black metal evidence case, and he was dark-faced and grim. Even the news that Tom was safe at home failed to cheer him much.

  `Where is he?'

  `Taking a bath,' Hillman said.

  `I've got to talk to him. I want a full statement.'

  `Not tonight, Lieutenant. The boy's been through the wringer.'

  `But he's the most important witness we have.'

  `I know that. He'll give you his full story tomorrow.'

  Bastian glanced from him to me. We were just inside the front door, and Hillman seemed unwilling to let him come in any farther.

  `I expected better cooperation, Mr. Hillman. You've had cooperation from us. But come to think of it, we haven't had it from you at any time.'

  `Don't give me any lectures, Lieutenant. My son is home, and it wasn't thanks to you that we got him back.'

  `A lot of police work went into it,' I said. `Lieutenant Bastian and I have been working closely together. We still are, I hope.'

  Hillman transferred his glare to me. He looked ready to order us both out. I said to Bastian: `You've got something to show us, Lieutenant, is that right?'

  `Yes.'

  He held up his evidence case. `You've already seen it, Archer. I'm not sure if Mr. Hillman has or not.'

  `What is it?'

  `I'll show you. I prefer not to describe it beforehand. Could we sit down at a table?'

  Hillman led us to the library and seated us at a table with a green-shaded reading lamp in the middle, which he switched on. It lit up the tablecloth brilliantly and cast the rest of the room, including our faces, into greenish shadow. Bastian opened the evidence box. It contained the hunting knife with the striped handle, which I had found stuck in Mike Harley's ribs.

  Hillman drew in his breath sharply.

  `You recognize it, do you?' Bastian said.

  `No. I do not.'

  `Pick it up and examine it more closely. It's quite all right to handle it. It's already been processed for fingerprints and blood.'

  Hillman didn't move. `Blood?'

  `This is the knife that was used to kill Mike Harley. We're almost certain that it was also used to kill the other decedent, Carol Harley. Blood of her type was found on it, as well as her husband's type. Also it fits her wound, the autopsist tells me. Pick it up, Mr. Hillman.'

  In a gingerly movement Hillman reached out and took it from the box. He turned it over and read the maker's name on the broad shining blade.

  `It looks like a good knife,' he said. `But I'm afraid I don't recognize it.'

  `Would you say that under oath?'

  `I'd have to. I never saw it before.'

  Bastian, with the air of a parent removing a dangerous toy, lifted the knife from his hands. `I don't want to say you're lying, Mr. Hillman. I do have a witness who contradicts you on this. Mr. Botkin, who owns the surplus goods store on lower Main, says that he sold you this knife.'

  He shook the knife, point foremost, at Hillman's face.

  Hillman looked scared and sick and obstinate. `It must have been somebody else. He must be mistaken.'

  `No. He knows you personally.'

  `I don't know him.'

  `You're a very well known man, sir, and Mr. Botkin is certain that you were in his store early this month. Perhaps I can refresh your recollection. You mentioned to Mr. Botkin, in connection with the purchase of this knife, that you were planning a little trip to Oregon with your son. You also complained to Botkin, as a lower Main Street businessman, about an alleged laxness at The Barroom Floor. It had to do with s
elling liquor to minors, I believe. Do you remember the conversation now?'

  `No,' Hillman said. `I do not. The man is lying.'

  `Why would he be lying?'

  `I have no idea. Go and find out. It's not my job to do your police work for you.'