The Far Side of the Dollar (32 page)

“What’s the matter with him?” I asked.

“He says he doesn’t feel well.”

“Sick?”

“Depressed. But he cheered up when I told him Tom was home. Hell be out shortly.”

“Good. In the meantime I want to talk to Tom.”

Hillman came and stood over me. His face was rather obscure
in the green penumbra. “Before you talk to him again, there’s something you ought to know.”

I waited for him to go on. Finally I asked him: “Is it about Tom?”

“It has to do with both of us.” He hesitated, his eyes intent on my face. “On second thought, I don’t think I’ll let my back hair down any further tonight.”

“You may never have another chance,” I said, “before it gets let down for you, the hard way.”

“That’s where you’re wrong. Nobody knows this particular thing but me.”

“And it has to do with you and Tom?”

“That’s right. Now let’s forget it.”

He didn’t want to forget it, though. He wanted to share his secret, without taking the responsibility of speaking out. He lingered by the table, looking down at my face with his stainless-steel eyes.

I thought of the feeling in Hillman’s voice when he spoke of his love for Tom. Perhaps that feeling was the element which would balance the equation.

“Is Tom your natural son?” I said.

He didn’t hesitate in answering. “Yes. He’s my own flesh and blood.”

“And you’re the only one who knows?”

“Carol knew, of course, and Mike Harley knew. He agreed to the arrangement in exchange for certain favors I was able to do him.”

“You kept him out of Portsmouth.”

“I helped to. You mustn’t imagine I was trying to mastermind some kind of plot. It all happened quite naturally. Carol came to me after Mike and his brother were arrested. She begged me to intervene on their behalf. I said I would. She was a lovely girl, and she expressed her gratitude in a natural way.”

“By going to bed with you.”

“Yes. She gave me one night. I went to her room in the Barcelona Hotel. You should have seen her, Archer, when she took off her clothes for me. She lit up that shabby room with the brass bed—”

I cut in on his excitement: “The brass bed is still there, and so was Otto Sipe, until last night. Did Sipe know about your big night on the brass bed?”

“Sipe?”

“The hotel detective.”

“Carol said he was gone that night.”

“And you say you only went there once.”

“Only once with Carol. I spent some nights in the Barcelona later with another girl. I suppose I was trying to recapture the rapture or something. She was a willing girl, but she was no substitute for Carol.”

I got up. He saw the look on my face and backed away. “What’s the matter with you, is something wrong?”

“Susanna Drew is a friend of mine. A good friend.”

“How could I know that?” he said with his mouth lifted on one side.

“You don’t know much,” I said. “You don’t know how sick it makes me to sit here and listen to you while you dabble around in your dirty little warmed-over affairs.”

He was astonished. I was astonished myself. Angry shouting at witnesses is something reserved for second-rate prosecutors in courtrooms.

“Nobody talks to me like that,” Hillman said in a shaking voice. “Get out of my house and stay out.”

“I’ll be delighted to.”

I got as far as the front door. It was like walking through deep, clinging mud. Then Hillman spoke behind me from the far side of the reception hall.

“Look here.” It was his favorite phrase.

I looked there. He walked toward me under the perilous chandelier. He said with his hands slightly lifted and turned outward:

“I can’t go on by myself, Archer. I’m sorry if I stepped on your personal toes.”

“It’s all right.”

“No, it isn’t. Are you in love with Susanna?”

I didn’t answer him.

“In case you’re wondering,” he said, “I haven’t touched her
since 1945. I ran into some trouble with that house detective, Sipe—”

I said impatiently: “I know. You knocked him down.”

“I gave him the beating of his life,” he said with a kind of naïve pride. “It was the last time he tried to pry any money out of me.”

“Until this week.”

He was jolted into temporary silence. “Anyway, Susanna lost interest—”

“I don’t want to talk about Susanna.”

“That suits me.”

We had moved back into the corridor that led to the library, out of hearing of the room where Elaine was. Hillman leaned on the wall like a bystander in an alley. His posture made me realize how transient and insecure he felt in his own house.

“There are one or two things I don’t understand,” I said. “You tell me you spent one night with Carol, and yet you’re certain that you fathered her son.”

“He was born just nine months later, December the twelfth.”

“That doesn’t prove you’re his father. Pregnancies often last longer, especially first ones. Mike Harley could have fathered him before the Shore Patrol took him. Or any other man.”

“There was no other man. She was a virgin.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I am not. Her marriage to Mike Harley was never consummated. Mike was impotent, which was one reason he was willing to have the boy pass as his.”

“Why was that so necessary, Hillman? Why didn’t you take the boy and raise him yourself?”

“I did that.”

“I mean, raise him openly as your own son.”

“I couldn’t. I had other commitments. I was already married to Elaine. She’s a New Englander, a Puritan of the first water.”

“With a fortune of the first water.”

“I admit I needed her help to start my business. A man has to make choices.”

He looked up at the chandelier. Its light fell starkly on his hollow bronze face. He turned his face away from the light.

“Who told you Mike Harley was impotent?”

“Carol did, and she wasn’t lying. She was a virgin, I tell you. She did a lot of talking in the course of the night. Her whole life. She told me Mike got what sex he got by being spanked, or beaten with a strap.”

“By her?”

“Yes. She didn’t enjoy it, of course, but she did it for him willingly enough. She seemed to feel that it was less dangerous than sex, than normal sex.”

A wave of sickness went through me. It wasn’t physical. But I could smell the old man’s cow barn and hear the whining of his one-eyed dog.

“I thought you were the one who was supposed to be impotent,” I said, “or sterile.”

He glanced at me sharply. “Who have you been talking to?”

“Your wife. She did the talking.”

“And she still thinks I’m sterile?”

“Yes.”

“Good.” He turned his face away from the light again and let out a little chuckle of relief. “Maybe we can pull this out yet. I told Elaine at the time we adopted Tom that Weintraub gave me a test and found that I was sterile. I was afraid she’d catch on to the fact of my paternity.”

“You may be sterile at that.”

He didn’t know what I meant. “No. It’s Elaine who is. I didn’t need to take any test. I have Tom to prove I’m a man.”

He didn’t have Tom.

W
E WENT INTO THE SITTING ROOM
, the waiting room. Though Tom was in the house the waiting seemed to go on, as if it had somehow coalesced with time. Elaine was in her place on the chesterfield. She had taken up
her knitting, and her stainless-steel needles glinted along the edge of the red wool. She looked up brightly at her husband.

“Where’s Tom?” he said. “Is he still upstairs?”

“I heard him go down the back stairs. I imagine Mrs. Perez is feeding him in the kitchen. He seems to prefer the kitchen to the sitting room. I suppose that’s natural, considering his heredity.”

“We won’t go into the subject of that, eh?”

Hillman went into the bar alcove and made himself a very dark-looking highball. He remembered to offer me one, which I declined.

“What did that policeman want?” Elaine asked him.

“He had some stupid questions on his mind. I prefer not to go into them.”

“So you’ve been telling me for the past twenty-five years. You prefer not to go into things. Save the surface. Never mind the dry rot at the heart.”

“Could we dispense with the melodrama?”

“The word is tragedy, not melodrama. A tragedy has gone through this house and you don’t have the mind to grasp it. You live in a world of appearances, like a fool.”

“I know. I know.” His voice was light, but he looked ready to throw his drink in her face. “I’m an ignorant engineer, and I never studied philosophy.”

Her needles went on clicking. “I could stand your ignorance, but I can’t stand your evasions any longer.”

He drank part of his drink, and waved his free hand loosely over his head. “Good heavens, Elaine, how much do I have to take from you? This isn’t the time or place for one of those.”

“There never is a time or place,” she said. “If there’s time, you change the clocks—this is known as crossing the International Ralph Line—and suddenly it’s six o’clock in the morning, in Tokyo. If there’s a place, you find an escape hatch. I see your wriggling legs and then you’re off and away, into the wild Ralph yonder. You never faced up to anything in your life.”

He winced under her bitter broken eloquence. “That isn’t true,” he said uneasily. “Archer and I have been really dredging tonight.”

“Dredging in the warm shallows of your nature? I thought you reserved that pastime for your women. Like Susanna Drew.”

Her name sent a pang through me. It was a nice name, innocent and bold and slightly absurd, and it didn’t deserve to be bandied about by these people. If the Hillmans had ever been innocent, their innocence had been frittered away in a marriage of pretenses. It struck me suddenly that Hillman’s affair with Susanna had also been one of pretenses. He had persuaded her to take care of Carol without any hint that he was the father of the child she was carrying.

“Good Lord,” he was saying now, “are we back on the Drew girl again after all these years?”

“Well, are we?” Elaine said.

Fortunately the telephone rang. Hillman went into the alcove to answer it, and turned to me with his hand clapped over the mouthpiece.

“It’s Bastian, for you. You can take the call in the pantry. I’m going to listen on this line.”

There wasn’t much use arguing. I crossed the music room and the dining room to the butler’s pantry and fumbled around in the dark for the telephone. I could hear Mrs. Perez in the kitchen, talking to Tom in musical sentences about her native province of Sinaloa. Bastian’s voice in the receiver sounded harsh and inhuman by comparison:

“Archer?”

“I’m here.”

“Good. I checked the matter of Dick Leandro’s transportation, in fact I’ve just been talking to a girl friend of his. She’s a senior at the college, named Katie Ogilvie, and she owns a Chevrolet sedan, this year’s model, blue in color. She finally admitted she lent it to him last night. He put over a hundred miles on the odometer.”

“Are you sure she wasn’t with him? He had a girl with him, or another boy, Daly wasn’t quite sure.”

“It wasn’t Miss Ogilvie,” Bastian said. “She was peeved about the fact that he used her car to take another girl for a long ride.”

“How does she know it was a girl?”

“The lady dropped a lipstick in the front seat. A very nice white gold lipstick, fourteen carat. I don’t think,” he added dryly, “that Miss Ogilvie would have testified so readily if it wasn’t for that lipstick. Apparently Leandro impressed the need for secrecy on her.”

“Did he say why?”

“It had something to do with the Hillman kidnapping. That was all she knew. Well, do we pick up Leandro? You seem to be calling the shots.”

“He’s on his way out here. Maybe you better follow along.”

“You sound as if things are building up to a climax.”

“Yeah.”

I could see its outlines. They burned on my eyeballs like the lights of Dack’s Auto Court. I sat in the dark after Bastian hung up, and tried to blink them away. But they spread out into the darkness around me and became integrated with the actual world.

Sinaloa, Mrs. Perez was saying or kind of singing to Tom in the kitchen, Sinaloa was a land of many rivers. There were eleven rivers in all, and she and her family lived so close to one of them that her brothers would put on their bathing suits and run down for a swim every day. Her father used to go down to the river on Sunday and catch fish with a net and distribute them to the neighbors. All the neighbors had fish for Sunday lunch.

Tom said it sounded like fun.

Ah yes, it was like Paradise, she said, and her father was a highly regarded man in their
barrio
. Of course it was hot in summer, that was the chief drawback, a hundred and twenty degrees in the shade sometimes. Then big black clouds would pile up along the Sierra Madre Occidental, and it would rain so hard, inches in just two hours. Then it would be sunny again. Sunny, sunny, sunny! That was how life went in Sinaloa.

Tom wanted to know if her father was still alive. She replied with joy that her father lived on, past eighty now, in good health. Perez was visiting him on his present trip to Mexico.

“I’d like to visit your father.”

“Maybe you will some day.”

I opened the door. Tom was at the kitchen table, eating the last of his soup. Mrs. Perez was leaning over him with a smiling maternal mouth and faraway eyes. She looked distrustfully at me. I was an alien in their land of Sinaloa.

“What do you want?”

“A word with Tom. I’ll have to ask you to leave for a bit.”

She stiffened.

“On second thought, there won’t be any more secrets in this house. You might as well stay, Mrs. Perez.”

“Thank
you.”

She picked up the soup bowl and walked switching to the sink, where she turned the hot water full on, Tom regarded me across the table with the infinite boredom of the young. He was very clean and pale.

“I hate to drag you back over the details,” I said, “but you’re the only one who can answer some of these questions.”

“It’s okay.”

“I’m not clear about yesterday, especially last night. Were you still at the Barcelona Hotel when Mike Harley got back from Vegas?”