The Far Side of the Dollar (26 page)

“Yesterday. We had no good reason to hold him in custody. There’s no law that says you have to inform on your own brother.”

“Is he back home in Long Beach?”

“Yes. He’ll be available for the trial, if there’s anybody left to prosecute.”

He was needling me about the death of Otto Sipe. On that note I left.

I made a detour up the coast highway on the way to my appointment with Dr. Weintraub, and stopped at Ben Daly’s service station. Ben was there by the pump, with a bandage around his head. When he saw me he went into the office and didn’t come out. A boy who looked like a teen-aged version of Ben emerged after a while. He asked in an unfriendly way if there was anything he could do for me.

“I’d like to talk to Mr. Daly for a minute.”

“I’m sorry, Dad doesn’t want to talk to you. He’s very upset, about this morning.”

“So am I. Tell him that. And ask him if he’ll look at a picture for identification purposes.”

The boy went into the office, closing the door behind him. Across the roaring highway, the Barcelona Hotel asserted itself in the sunlight like a monument of a dead civilization. In the driveway I could see a number of county cars, and a man in deputy’s uniform keeping back a crowd of onlookers.

Daly’s boy came back with a grim look on his face. “Dad says he doesn’t want to look at any more of your pictures. He says you and your pictures brought him bad luck.”

“Tell him I’m sorry.”

The boy retreated formally, like an emissary. He didn’t show himself again, and neither did his father. I gave up on Daly for the present.

Dr. Weintraub’s office was in one of the new medical buildings on Wilshire, near Cedars of Lebanon Hospital. I went up in a self-service elevator to a waiting room on the fifth floor. This was handsomely furnished in California Danish and had soothing music piped in, which got on my nerves before I had time to sit down. Two pregnant women on opposite sides of the room caught me, a mere man, in a crossfire of pitying glances.

The highly made-up girl behind the counter in one corner said:

“Mr. Archer?”

“Yes.”

“Dr. Weintraub will see you in a few minutes. You’re not a patient, are you? So we needn’t bother taking your history, need we?”

“It would give you the horrors, honey.”

She moved her eyelashes up and down a few times, to indicate shocked surprise. Her eyelashes were long and thick and phony, and they waved clumsily in the air like tarantula legs.

Dr. Weintraub opened a door and beckoned me into his consulting room. He was a man about my age, perhaps a few years older. Like a lot of other doctors, he hadn’t looked after himself. His shoulders were stooped under his white smock, and he was putting on weight. The curly black hair was retreating from his forehead.

But the dark eyes behind his glasses were extraordinarily alive. I could practically feel their impact as we shook hands. I recognized his face, but I couldn’t place it.

“You look as though you could use a rest,” he said. “That’s free advice.”

“Thanks. It will have to come later.” I didn’t tell him he needed exercise.

He sat down rather heavily at his desk, and I took the patient’s chair facing him. One whole wall of the room was occupied by bookshelves. The books seemed to cover several branches of medicine, with special emphasis on psychiatry and gynecology.

“Are you a psychiatrist, doctor?”

“No, I am not.” His eyes were melancholy. “I studied for the Boards at one time but then the war came along. Afterwards I chose another specialty, delivering babies.” He smiled, and his eyes lit up. “It’s so very satisfying, and the incidence of success is so very much higher. I mean, I seldom lose a baby.”

“You delivered Thomas Hillman.”

“Yes. I told you so on the telephone.”

“Have you refreshed your memory about the date?”

“I had my secretary look it up. Thomas was born on December 12, 1945. A week later, on December 20 to be exact, I arranged for the baby’s adoption by Captain and Mrs. Ralph Hillman. He made a wonderful Christmas present for them,” he said warmly.

“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.

W
ITH 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 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 may 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.”