The Far Side of the Dollar (28 page)

“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 w
as
. 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 Chewy?”

“Yeah. He could be the one. But I wouldn’t want to swear to it in court.”

T
HE
S
ANTA
M
ONICA
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.

“I’m not going back to my cruddy so-called parents.”

“You have nobody else.”

“I have myself.”

“You haven’t been handling yourself too well.”

“Another lecture.”

“I’m pointing out a fact. If you could look after yourself decently, you might make out a case for independence. But you’ve been rampaging around clobbering middle-aged doctors—”

“He tried to make me go home.”

“You’re going home. The alternative seems to be a life with bums and criminals.”

“You’re talking about my parents, my real parents.” He spoke with conscious drama, but there was also a kind of bitter awe in his voice. “My mother wasn’t a bum and she wasn’t a criminal. She was—nice.”

“I didn’t mean her.”

“And my father wasn’t so bad, either,” he said without conviction.

“Who killed them, Tom?”

His face became blank and tight. It looked like a wooden mask used to fend off suffering.

“I don’t know anything about it,” he said in a monotone. “I didn’t know Carol was dead, even, till I saw the papers last night. I didn’t know Mike was dead till I saw the papers today. Next question.”

“Don’t be like that, Tom. I’m not a cop, and I’m not your enemy.”

“With the so-called parents I’ve got, who needs enemies? All my—all Captain Hillman ever wanted was a pet boy around the house, somebody to do tricks. I’m tired of doing tricks for him.”

“You
should
be tired, after this last trick. It was a honey of a trick.”

He gave me his first direct look, half in anger and half in fear. “I had a right to go with my real parents.”

“Maybe. We won’t argue about that. But you certainly had no right to help them extort money from your father.”

“He’s not my father.”

“I know that. Do you have to keep saying it?”

“Do you have to keep calling him my father?”

He was a difficult boy. I felt good, anyway. I had him.

“Okay,” I said. “We’ll call him Mr. X and we’ll call your mother Madam X and well call you the Lost Dauphin of France.”

“That isn’t so funny.”

He was right. It wasn’t.

“Getting back to the twenty-five thousand dollars you helped to take them for, I suppose you know you’re an accomplice in a major felony.”

“I didn’t know about the money. They didn’t tell me. I don’t think Carol knew about it, either.”

“That’s hard to believe, Tom.”

“It’s true. Mike didn’t tell us. He just said he had a deal cooking.”

“If you didn’t know about the extortion, why did you ride away in the trunk of his car?”

“So I wouldn’t be seen. Mike said my dad—” he swallowed the word, with disgust—“he said that Captain Hillman had all the police looking for me, to put me back in Laguna—”

He became aware of his present situation. He peered around furtively, scrambled under the wheel to the far door. I pulled him back into the middle of the seat and put an armlock on him.

“You’re staying with me, Tom, if I have to use handcuffs.”

“Fuzz!”

The jeering word came strangely from him, like a foreign word he was trying to make his own. It bothered me. Boys, like men, have to belong to something. Tom had felt betrayed by one world, the plush deceptive world of Ralph Hillman, with schools like Laguna Perdida on the underside of the weave. He had plunged blindly into another world, and now he had lost that. His mind must be desperate for a place to rest, I thought, and I wasn’t doing much of a job of providing one.

A bus came down the street. As it turned into the loading area, I caught a glimpse of passengers at the windows, travel-drugged and blasé. California here we come, right back where we started from.

I relaxed my grip on Tom. “I couldn’t let you go,” I said,
“even if I wanted to. You’re not stupid. Try for once to figure out how this looks to other people.”

“This?”

“The whole charade. Your running away from school—for which I certainly don’t blame you—”

“Thanks a lot.”

I disregarded his irony. “And the phony kidnapping and all the rest of it. An adopted son is just as important as a real one to his parents. Yours have been worried sick about you.”

“I bet.”

“Neither one of them gave a damn about the money, incidentally. It’s you they cared about, and care about.”

“There’s something missing,” he said.

“What?”

“The violin accompaniment.”

“You’re a hard boy to talk to, Tom.”

“My
friends
don’t think so.”

“What’s a friend? Somebody who lets you run wild?”

“Somebody who doesn’t want to throw me into the Black Hole of Calcutta, otherwise known as Laguna Perdida School.”

“I don’t.”

“You say you don’t. But you’re working for Captain Hillman, and he does.”

“Not any more.”

The boy shook his head. “I don’t believe you, and I don’t believe him. After a few things
happen
to you, you start to believe what people do, not what they say. People like the Hillmans would think that a person like Carol was a nothing, a nothing woman. But she wasn’t to me. She liked me. She treated me well. Even my real father never raised his hand to me. The only trouble we had was about the way he treated Carol.”

He had dropped his brittle sardonic front and was talking to me in a human voice. Stella chose this moment to come out of the loading area onto the sidewalk. Her face was pinched with disappointment.

Tom caught sight of her almost as soon as I did. His eyes lit up as if she was an angel from some lost paradise. He leaned across me.

“Hey! Stell!”

She came running. I got out of the car and let her take my place beside the boy. They didn’t embrace or kiss. Perhaps their hands met briefly. I got in behind the wheel.

Stella was saying: “It
feels
as though you’ve been gone for ages.”

“It does to me, too.”

“You should have called me sooner.”

“I did.”

“I mean, right away.”

“I was afraid you’d—do what you did.” He jerked his chin in my direction.

“I didn’t, though. Not really. It was his idea. Anyway, you have to go home. We both do.”

“I have no home.”

“Neither have I, then. Mine’s just as bad as yours.”

“No, it isn’t.”

“Yes, it is. Anyway,” she said to clinch the argument, “you need a bath. I can smell you. And a shave.”

I glanced at his face. It had a pleased silly embarrassed expression.

The street was empty of traffic at the moment. I started the car and made a U-turn toward the south. Tom offered no objection.

Once on the freeway, in that anonymous world of rushing lights and darkness, he began to talk in his human voice to Stella. Carol had phoned him, using his personal number, several weeks before. She wanted to arrange a meeting with him. That night, driving Ralph Hillman’s Cadillac, he picked her up at the view-point overlooking the sea near Dack’s Auto Court.