The Far Side of the Dollar (14 page)

Before I went out for dinner by myself, I checked my answering service. Susanna Drew had left her number for me.

“I’ve been trying to get you,” I said to her.

“I’ve been right here in my apartment.”

“I mean before I knew you left your number.”

“Oh? What did you have in mind?”

“The Motel Institute of St. Louis is making a very nice offer to couples who want to register for their course in motel management.”

“It sounds inviting. I’ve always wanted to go out to sunny California and manage a motel.”

“Good. We’ll have dinner and talk strategy. Television won’t last, you know that in your heart. None of these avant-garde movements last.”

“Sorry, Lew. I’d love dinner, another night. Tonight I’m not up to it. But I did want to thank you for looking after me this afternoon. I was in a bad way for a while.”

“I’m afraid I did it to you.”

“No. My whole lousy life reared up and did it to me. You and your pictures were just the catalytic agent.”

“Could you stand a visit from a slightly catalytic agent? I’ll bring dinner from the delicatessen. I’ll buy you a gardenia.”

“No. I don’t want to see you tonight.”

“And you haven’t changed your mind about that telephone call you wouldn’t tell me about?”

“No. There are things about me you needn’t know.”

“I suppose that’s encouraging in a way. Why did you leave your number for me, then?”

“I found something that might help you—a picture of Carol taken in 1945.”

“I’ll come and get it. You haven’t really told me how you met her, you know.”

“Please don’t come. I’ll send a messenger with it.”

“If you insist. I’ll wait in my office.” I gave her the address.

“Lew?” Her voice was lighter and sweeter, almost poignant “You’re not just putting on an act, are you? To try and pry out my personal secrets, I mean?”

“It’s no act,” I said.

“Likewise,” she said. “Thank you.”

I sat in the echoing silence thinking that she had been badly treated by a man or men. It made me angry to think of it I didn’t go out for dinner after all. I sat and nursed my anger until Susanna’s messenger arrived.

He was a young Negro in uniform who talked like a college graduate. He handed me a sealed manila envelope, which I ripped open.

It contained a single glossy print, preserved between two sheets of corrugated cardboard, of a young blonde girl wearing a pageboy bob and a bathing suit. You couldn’t pin down the reason for her beauty. It was partly in her clear low forehead, the high curve of her cheek, her perfect round chin; partly in the absolute femaleness that looked out of her eyes and informed her body.

Wondering idly who had taken the photograph, I turned it over. Rubber-stamped in purple ink on the back was the legend: “Photo Credit: Harold ‘Har’ Harley, Barcelona Hotel.”

“Will that be all?” the messenger said at the door.

“No.” I gave him ten dollars.

“This is too much, sir. I’ve already been paid.”

“I know. But I want you to buy a gardenia and deliver it back to Miss Drew.”

He said he would.

1945 WAS A LONG TIME AGO
, as time went in California. The Barcelona Hotel was still standing, but I seemed to remember hearing that it was closed. I took the long drive down Sunset to the coastal highway on the off-chance of developing my lead to Harold Harley. Also I wanted to take another look at the building where Harley and Carol had lived.

It was a huge old building, Early Hollywood Byzantine, with stucco domes and minarets, and curved verandahs where famous faces of the silent days had sipped their bootleg rum. Now it stood abandoned under the bluff. The bright lights of a service station across the highway showed that its white paint was flaking off and some of the windows were broken.

I parked on the weed-ruptured concrete of the driveway and walked up to the front door. Taped to the glass was a notice of bankruptcy, with an announcement that the building was going to be sold at public auction in September.

I flashed my light through the glass into the lobby. It was still completely furnished, but the furnishings looked as though they hadn’t been replaced in a generation. The carpet was worn threadbare, the chairs were gutted. But the place still had atmosphere, enough of it to summon up a flock of ghosts.

I moved along the curving verandah, picking my way among the rain-warped wicker furniture, and shone my light through a french window into the dining room. The tables were set, complete with cocked-hat napkins, but there was dust lying thick on
the napery. A good place for ghosts to feed, I thought, but not for me.

Just for the hell of it, though, and as a way of asserting myself against the numerous past, I went back to the front door and tapped loudly with my flashlight on the glass. Deep inside the building, at the far end of a corridor, a light showed itself. It was a moving light, which came toward me.

The man who was carrying it was big, and he walked as if he had sore feet or legs. I could see his face now in the upward glow of his electric lantern. A crude upturned nose, a bulging forehead, a thirsty mouth. It was the face of a horribly ravaged baby who had never been weaned from the bottle. I could also see that he had a revolver in his other hand.

He pointed it at me and flashed the light in my eyes. “This place is closed. Can’t you read?” he shouted through the glass.

“I want to talk to you.”

“I don’t want to talk to you. Beat it. Amscray.”

He waved the gun at me. I could tell from his voice and look that he had been drinking hard. A drunk with a gun and an excuse to use it can be murder, literally. I made one more attempt:

“Do you know a photographer named Harold Harley who used to be here?”

“Never heard of him. Now you get out of here before I blow a hole in you. You’re trespashing.”

He lifted the heavy revolver. I withdrew, as far as the service station across the street. A quick-moving man in stained white coveralls came out from under a car on a hoist and offered to sell me gas.

“It ought to take ten,” I said. “Who’s the character in the Barcelona Hotel? He acts like he was bitten by a bear.”

The man gave me a one-sided smile. “You run into Otto Sipe?”

“If that’s the watchman’s name.”

“Yeah. He worked there so long he thinks he owns the place.”

“How long?”

“Twenty years or more. I been here since the war myself, and he goes back before me. He was their dick.”

“Hotel detective?”

“Yeah. He told me once he used to be an officer of the law. If he was, he didn’t learn much. Check your oil?”

“Don’t bother, I just had it changed. Were you here in 1945?”

“That’s the year I opened. I went into the service early and got out early. Why?”

“I’m a private detective. The name is Archer.” I offered him my hand.

He wiped his on his coveralls before he took it. “Daly. Ben Daly.”

“A man named Harold Harley used to stay at the Barcelona in 1945. He was a photographer.”

Daly’s face opened. “Yeah. I remember him. He took a picture of me and the wife to pay for his gas bill once. We still have it in the house.”

“You wouldn’t know where he is now?”

“Sorry, I haven’t seen him in ten years.”

“What was the last you saw of him?”

“He had a little studio in Pacific Palisades. I dropped in once or twice to say hello. I don’t think he’s there any more.”

“I gather you liked him.”

“Sure. There’s no harm in Harold.”

Men could change. I showed Carol’s picture to Daly. He didn’t know her. “You couldn’t pin down the address in Pacific Palisades for me?”

He rubbed the side of his face. It needed retreading, but it was a good face. “I can tell you where it is.”

He told me where it was, on a side street just off Sunset, next door to a short-order restaurant. I thanked him, and paid him for the gas.

The short-order restaurant was easy to find, but the building next door to it was occupied by a paperback bookstore. A young woman wearing pink stockings and a ponytail presided over the cash register. She looked at me pensively through her eye makeup when I asked her about Harold Harley.

“It seems to me I heard there was a photographer in here at one time.”

“Where would he be now?”

“I haven’t the slightest idea, honestly. We’ve only been here less than a year ourselves—a year in September.”

“How are you doing?”

“We’re making the rent, at least.”

“Who do you pay it to?”

“The man who runs the lunch counter. Mr. Vernon. He ought to give us free meals for what he charges. Only don’t quote me if you talk to him. We’re a month behind now on the rent.”

I bought a book and went next door for dinner. It was a place where I could eat with my hat on. While I was waiting for my steak, I asked the waitress for Mr. Vernon. She turned to the white-hatted short-order cook who had just tossed my steak onto the grill.

“Mr. Vernon, gentleman wants to speak to you.”

He came over to the counter, an unsmiling thin-faced man with glints of gray beard showing on his chin. “You said you wanted it bloody. You’ll get it bloody.” He brandished his spatula.

“Good. I understand you own the store next door.”

“That and the next one to it.” The thought encouraged him a little. “You looking for a place to rent?”

“I’m looking for a man, a photographer named Harold Harley.”

“He rented that store for a long time. But he couldn’t quite make a go of it. There’s too many photographers in this town. He held on for seven or eight years after the war and then gave up on it.”

“You don’t know where he is now?”

“No sir, I do not.”

The sizzling of my steak reached a certain intensity, and he heard it. He went and flipped it with his spatula and came back to me. “You want french frieds?”

“All right What’s the last you saw of Harley?”

“The last I heard of him he moved out to the Valley. That was a good ten years ago. He was trying to run his business out of the front room of his house in Van Nuys. He’s a pretty good photographer—he took a fine picture of my boy’s christening
party—but he’s got no head for business. I ought to know, he still owes me three months’ rent.”

Six young people came in and lined up along the counter. They had wind in their hair, sand in their ears, and the word “Surfbirds” stenciled across the backs of their identical yellow sweatshirts. All of them, girls and boys, ordered two hamburgers apiece.

One of the boys put a quarter in the jukebox and played “Surfin’ ain’t no sin.” Mr. Vernon got twelve hamburger patties out of the refrigerator and lined them up on the grill. He put my steak on a plate with a handful of fried potatoes and brought it to me personally.

“I could look up that Van Nuys address if it’s important. I kept it on account of the rent he owed me.”

“It’s important.” I showed him Carol’s picture, the young one Harley had taken. “Do you recognize his wife?”

“I didn’t even know he had a wife. I didn’t think he’d rate a girl like that.”

“Why not?”

“He’s no ladies’ man. He never was. Harold’s the quiet type.”

Doubt was slipping in again that I was on the right track. It made my head ache. “Can you describe him to me?”

“He’s just an ordinary-looking fellow, about my size, five foot ten. Kind of a long nose. Blue eyes. Sandy hair. There’s nothing special about him. Of course he’d be older now.”

“How old?”

“Fifty at least. I’m fifty-nine myself, due to retire next year. Excuse me, mister.”

He flipped the twelve hamburger patties over, distributed twelve half-buns on top of them and went out through a swinging door at the back. I ate at my steak. Mr. Vernon returned with a slip of paper on which he had written Harley’s Van Nuys address: 956 Elmhurst.

The waitress delivered the hamburgers to the surfbirds. They munched them in time to the music. The song the jukebox was playing as I went out had a refrain about “the day that I caught the big wave and made you my slave.” I drove up Sunset and onto the San Diego Freeway headed north.

Elmhurst was a working-class street of prewar bungalows built too close together. It was a warm night in the Valley, and some people were still out on their porches and lawns. A fat man drinking beer on the porch of 956 told me that Harley had sold him the house in 1960. He had his present address because he was still paying Harley monthly installments on a second trust deed.

That didn’t sound like the Harley I knew. I asked him for a description.

“He’s kind of a sad character,” the fat man said. “One of these guys that wouldn’t say ‘boo’ to a goose. He’s had his troubles, I guess.”

“What kind of troubles?”

“Search me. I don’t know him well. I only saw him the twice when I bought the house from him. He wanted out in a hurry, and he gave me a good buy. He had this chance for a job in Long Beach, developing film, and he didn’t want to commute.”

He gave me Harley’s address in Long Beach, which is a long way from Van Nuys. It was close to midnight when I found the house, a tract house near Long Beach Boulevard. It had brown weeds in the front yard, and was lightless, like most of the houses in the street.

I drove past a street light to the end of the block and walked back. The all-night traffic on the boulevard filled the air with a kind of excitement, rough and forlorn. I was raised in Long Beach, and I used to cruise its boulevards in a model-A Ford. Their sound, whining, threatening, rising, fading, spoke to something deep in my mind which I loved and hated. I didn’t want to knock on Harley’s door. I was almost certain I had the wrong man.

The overhead door of the attached garage was closed but not locked. I opened it quietly. The street light down the block shone on the rear of a dirty white Ford sedan with an Idaho license plate.

I went to the lefthand door of the car and opened it. The dome light came on. The car was registered in the name of Robert Brown, with an address in Pocatello. My heart was pounding so hard I could scarcely breathe.

The door from the garage into the house was suddenly outlined
by light. The door sprung open. The light slapped me across the eyes and drenched me.