The Far Side of the Dollar (18 page)

“Come inside, will you? Maybe we can make some kind of a deal.”

The front door opened directly into the living room. I stepped over a vacuum-cleaner hose just inside the door.

“I’ve been cleaning the house,” she said. “I had to do something and that was all I could think of.”

“I hope Harold will be coming home to appreciate it soon.”

“Yeah. It would help him, wouldn’t it, if I helped you to nail his brother?”

“It certainly would.”

“Would you let him go if you got Mike in his place?”

“I can’t promise that. I think it would probably happen.”

“Why can’t you promise?”

“I’m just a local investigator. But Mike is the one we really want. Do you know where he is, Mrs. Harley?”

For a long moment she stood perfectly still, her face as unchanging as one of her photographs hanging on the wall. Then she nodded slightly.

“I know where he was at three a.m. this morning.” She jabbed a thumb toward the telephone. “He called here from Las Vegas at three a.m. He wanted Harold. I told him I didn’t know where Harold was—he was gone when I came home last night.”

“You’re sure it was Mike who called?”

“It couldn’t have been anybody else. I know his voice. And it isn’t the first time he called here, whining and wheedling for some of our hard-earned money.”

“He wanted money?”

“That’s right. I was to wire him five hundred dollars to the Western Union office in Las Vegas.”

“But he was carrying over twenty thousand.”

Her face closed, and became impassive. “I wouldn’t know about that. All I know is what he said. He needed money bad, and I was to wire him five hundred, which he would pay back double in twenty-four hours. I told him I’d see him in the hot place first. He was gambling.”

“It sounds like it, doesn’t it?”

“He’s a crazy gambler,” she said. “I hate a gambler.”

I called the Walters Agency in Reno. Arnie’s wife and partner Phyllis told me that Arnie had taken an early plane to Vegas. Harold Harley’s two-tone Plymouth had been spotted at a motel on the Vegas Strip.

Not more than two hours later, after a plane ride of my own,
I was sitting in a room of the motel talking with Arnie and the Plymouth’s new owner. He was a man named Fletcher who said he was from Phoenix, Arizona, although his accent sounded more like Texas. He was dressed up in a western dude costume, with high-heeled boots, a matching belt with a fancy silver buckle, and an amethyst instead of a tie. His Stetson lay on one of the twin beds, some women’s clothes on the other. The woman was in the bathroom taking a bath, Arnie told me, and I never did see her.

Mr. Fletcher was large and self-assured and very rough-looking. His face had been chopped rather carelessly from granite, then put out to weather for fifty or fifty-five years.

“I didn’t want to buy his heap,” he said. “I have a new Cadillac in Phoenix, you can check that. He didn’t even have a pink slip for it I paid him five hundred for the heap because he was broke, desperate to stay in the game.”

“What game was that?” I asked him.

“Poker.”

“It was a floating game,” Arnie said, “in one of the big hotels. Mr. Fletcher refuses to name the hotel, or the other players. It went on all day yesterday and most of last night. There’s no telling how much Harley lost, but he lost everything he had.”

“Over twenty thousand, probably. Was the game rigged?”

Fletcher turned his head and looked at me the way a statue looks at a man. “It was an honest game, friend. It had to be. I was the big winner.”

“I wasn’t questioning your honesty.”

“No sir. Some of the finest people in Phoenix visit the little woman and I in our residence and we visit them in their residences. Honest Jack Fletcher, they call me.”

There was a silence in which the three of us sat and listened to the air-conditioner. I said: “That’s fine, Mr. Fletcher. How much did you win?”

“That’s between I and the tax collector, friend. I won a bundle. Which is why I gave him five hundred for his heap. I have no use for the heap. You can take it away.” He lifted his arm in an imperial gesture.

“We’ll be doing just that,” Arnie said.

“You’re welcome to it. Anything I can do to cooperate.”

“You can answer a few more questions, Mr. Fletcher.” I got out my picture of Tom. “Did you see this boy with Harley at any time?”

He examined the picture as if it was a card he had drawn, then passed it back to me. “I did not.”

“Hear any mention of him?”

“I never did. Harley came and went by himself and he didn’t talk. You could see he didn’t belong in a high-stakes game, but he had the money, and he wanted to lose it.”

“He wanted to lose it?” Arnie said.

“That’s right, the same way I wanted to win. He’s a born loser, I’m a born winner.”

Fletcher got up and strutted back and forth across the room. He lit a Brazilian cigar, not offering any around. As fast as he blew it out, the smoke disappeared in the draft from the air-conditioner. “What time did the game break up this morning?” I said.

“Around three, when I took my last big pot.” His mouth savored the recollection. “I was willing to stay, but the other people weren’t. Harley wanted to stay, naturally, but he didn’t have the money to back it up. He isn’t much of a poker player, frankly.”

“Did he give you any trouble?”

“No sir. The gentleman who runs the game discourages that sort of thing. No trouble. Harley did put the bite on me at the end. I gave him a hundred dollars ding money to get home.”

“Home where?”

“He said he came from Idaho.”

I took a taxi back to the airport and made a reservation on a plane that stopped in Pocatello. Before sundown I was driving a rented car out of Pocatello along Rural Route Seven, where the elder Harleys lived.

T
HEIR FARM
, green and golden in the slanting light, lay in a curve of the river. I drove down a dusty lane to the farmhouse. It was built of white brick, without ornament of any kind. The barn, unpainted, was weathered gray and in poor repair.

The late afternoon was windless. The trees surrounding the fenced yard were as still as watercolors. The heat was oppressive, in spite of the river nearby, even worse than it had been in Vegas.

It was a far cry from Vegas to here, and difficult to believe that Harley had come home, or ever would. But the possibility had to be checked out

A black and white farm collie with just one eye barked at me through the yard fence when I stepped out of the car. I tried to calm him down by talking to him, but he was afraid of me and he wouldn’t be calmed. Eventually an old woman wearing an apron came out of the house and silenced the dog with a word. She called to me:

“Mr. Harley’s in the barn.”

I let myself in through the wire gate. “May I talk to you?”

“That depends what the talk’s about.”

“Family matters.”

“If that’s another way to sell insurance, Mr. Harley doesn’t believe in insurance.”

“I’m not selling anything. Are you Mrs. Harley?”

“I am.”

She was a gaunt woman of seventy, square-shouldered in a long-sleeved, striped shirtwaist. Her gray hair was drawn back severely from her face. I liked her face, in spite of the brokenness in and around the eyes. There was humor in it, and suffering half transformed into understanding.

“Who are you?” she said.

“A friend of your son Harold’s. My name is Archer.”

“Isn’t that nice? We’re going to sit down to supper as soon as Mr. Harley finishes up the milking. Why don’t you stay and have some supper with us?”

“You’re very kind.” But I didn’t want to eat with them.

“How is Harold?” she said. “We don’t hear from him so often since he married his wife. Lila.”

Evidently she hadn’t heard about the trouble her sons were in. I hesitated to tell her, and she noticed my hesitation.

“Is something the matter with Harold?” she said sharply.

“The matter is with Mike. Have you seen him?”

Her large rough hands began to wipe themselves over and over on the front of her apron. “We haven’t seen Mike in twenty years. We don’t expect to see him again in this life.”

“You may, though. He told a man he was coming home.”

“This is not his home. It hasn’t been since he was a boy. He turned his back on us then. He went off to Pocatello to live with a man named Brown, and that was his downfall.”

“How so?”

“That daughter of Brown was a Jezebel. She ruined my son. She taught him all the filthy ways of the world.”

Her voice had changed. It sounded as if the voice of somebody slightly crazy was ranting ventriloquially through her. I said with deliberate intent to stop it:

“Carol’s been paid back for whatever she did to him. She was murdered in California on Monday.”

Her hands stopped wiping themselves and flew up in front of her. She looked at their raw ugliness with her broken eyes.

“Did Mike do it to her?”

“We think so. We’re not sure.”

“And you’re a policeman,” she stated.

“More or less.”

“Why do you come to us? We did our best, but we couldn’t control him. He passed out of our control long ago.” Her hands dropped to her sides.

“If he gets desperate enough, he may head this way.”

“No, he never will. Mr. Harley said he would kill him if he
ever set foot on our property again. That was twenty years ago, when he ran away from the Navy. Mr. Harley meant it, too. Mr. Harley never could abide a lawbreaker. It isn’t true that Mr. Harley treated him cruelly. Mr. Harley was only trying to save him from the Devil.”

The ranting, ventriloquial note had entered her voice again. Apparently she knew nothing about her son, and if she did she couldn’t talk about him in realistic terms. It was beginning to look like a dry run.

I left her and went to the barn to find her husband. He was in the stable under the barn, sitting on a milking stool with his forehead against the black and white flank of a Holstein cow. His hands were busy at her teats, and her milk surged in the pail between his knees. Its sweet fresh smell penetrated the smell of dung that hung like corruption in the heated air.

“Mr. Harley?”

“I’m busy,” he said morosely. “This is the last one, if you want to wait.”

I backed away and looked at the other cows. There were ten or twelve of them, moving uneasily in their stanchions as I moved. Somewhere out of sight a horse blew and stamped.

“You’re disturbing the livestock,” Mr. Harley said. “Stand still if you want to stay.”

I stood still for about five minutes. The one-eyed collie drifted into the stable and did a thorough job of smelling my shoes. But he still wouldn’t let me touch him. When I reached down, he moved back.

Mr. Harley got up and emptied his pail into a ten-gallon can; the foaming milk almost overflowed. He was a tall old man wearing overalls and a straw hat which almost brushed the low rafters. His eyes were as flat and angry and his mouth as sternly righteous as in Harold’s portrait of him. The dog retreated whining as he came near.

“You’re not from around here. Are you on the road?”

“No.” I told him who I was. “And I’ll get to the point right away. Your son Mike’s in very serious trouble.”

“Mike is not my son,” he intoned solemnly, “and I have no wish to hear about him or his trouble.”

“But he may be coming here. He said he was. If he does, you’ll have to inform the police.”

“You don’t have to instruct me in what I ought to do. I get my instructions from a higher power. He gives me my instructions direct in my heart.” He thumped his chest with a gnarled fist.

“That must be convenient.”

“Don’t blaspheme or make mock, or you’ll regret it. I can call down the punishment.”

He reached for a pitchfork leaning against the wall. The dog ran out of the stable with his tail down. I became aware suddenly that my shirt was sticking to my back and I was intensely uncomfortable. The three tines of the pitchfork were sharp and gleaming, and they were pointed at my stomach.

“Get out of here,” the old man said. “I’ve been fighting the Devil all my life, and I know one of his cohorts when I see one.”

So do I, I said, but not out loud. I backed as far as the door, stumbled on the high threshold, and went out. Mrs. Harley was standing near my car, just inside the wire gate. Her hands were quiet on her meager breast.

“I’m sorry,” she said to me. “I’m sorry for Carol Brown. She wasn’t a bad little girl, but I hardened my heart against her.”

“It doesn’t matter now. She’s dead.”

“It matters in the sight of heaven.”

She raised her eyes to the arching sky as if she imagined a literal heaven like a second story above it. Just now it was easier for me to imagine a literal hell, just over the horizon, where the sunset fires were burning.

“I’ve done so many wrong things,” she said, “and closed my eyes to so many others. But don’t you see, I had to make a choice.”

“I don’t understand you.”

“A choice between Mr. Harley and my sons. I knew that he was a hard man. A cruel man, maybe not quite right in the head. But what could I do? I had to stick with my husband. And I wasn’t strong enough to stand up to him. Nobody is. I had to stand by while he drove our sons out of our home. Harold was the soft one, he forgave us in the end. But Mike never did. He’s like his father. I never even got to see my grandson.”

Tears ran in the gullies of her face. Her husband came out of the barn carrying the ten-gallon can in his left hand and the pitchfork in his right.

“Go in the house, Martha. This man is a cohort of the Devil. I won’t allow you to talk to him.”

“Don’t hurt him. Please.”

“Go in the house,” he repeated.

She went, with her gray head down and her feet dragging.

“As for you, cohort,” he said, “you get off my farm or I’ll call down the punishment on you.”

He shook his pitchfork at the reddening sky. I was already in the car and turning up the windows.

I turned them down again as soon as I got a few hundred yards up the lane. My shirt was wet through now, and I could feel sweat running down my legs. Looking back, I caught a glimpse of the river, flowing sleek and solid in the failing light, and it refreshed me.