The Far Side of the Dollar (9 page)

“I did.” His face hardened. “She needed money, she was telling him, money to get away from her husband.”

“You’re sure you heard that?”

“Sure as I’m sitting here.”

“What was Tom’s attitude?”

“Looked to me like he was fascinated.”

“Had he been drinking?”

“She
was. He didn’t drink. They don’t serve drinks to minors at the Floor. No sir. She had him hyped on something worse than drink.”

“Drugs?”

“You know what I mean.” His hands moulded a woman’s figure in the air.

“You used the word ‘hyped.’ ”

“It was just a manner of speaking,” he said nervously, rubbing his upper arm through the shirt sleeve.

“Are you on the needle?”

“No sir. I’m on the TV,” he said with a sudden downward smile.

“Show me your arms.”

“I don’t have to. You got no right.”

“I want to test your veracity. Okay?”

He unbuttoned his cuffs and pushed his sleeves up his thin yellow arms. The pitted scars in them were old and dry.

“I got out of Lexington seven years ago,” he said, “and I haven’t fallen since, I thank the good Lord.”

He touched his scars with a kind of reverence. They were like tiny extinct volcanoes in his flesh. He covered them up.

“You’re doing all right, Mr. Jackman. With your background, you’d probably know if Tom was on drugs.”

“I probably would. He wasn’t. More than once I lectured him on the subject. Musicians have their temptations. But he took my lectures to heart.” He shifted his hand to the region of his heart. “I ought to of lectured him on the subject of women.”

“I never heard that it did much good. Did you ever see Tom and the blonde with anyone else?”

“No.”

“Did he introduce her to anyone?”

“I doubt it. He was keeping her to himself. Showing her off, but keeping her to himself.”

“You don’t have any idea what her name is?”

“No. I don’t.”

I got up and thanked him. “I’m sorry if I gave you a rough time.”

“I’ve had rougher.”

D
ACK’S
A
UTO
C
OURT
was on the edge of the city, in a rather rundown suburb named Ocean View. The twelve or fifteen cottages of the court lay on the flat top of a bluff, below the highway and above the sea. They were made of concrete block and painted an unnatural green. Three or four cars, none of them recent models, were parked on the muddy gravel.

The rain had let up and fresh yellow light slanted in from a hole in the west, as if to provide a special revelation of the ugliness of Dack’s Auto Court. Above the hutch marked “Office,” a single ragged palm tree leaned against the light. I parked beside it and went in.

A hand-painted card taped to the counter instructed me to “Ring for Proprietor.” I punched the handbell beside it. It didn’t work.

Leaning across the counter, I noticed on the shelf below it a telephone and a metal filing box divided into fifteen numbered sections. The registration card for number seven was dated three weeks before, and indicated that “Mr. and Mrs. Robt. Brown” were paying sixteen dollars a week for that cottage. The spaces provided on the card for home address and license number were empty.

The screen door creaked behind me. A big old man with a naked condor head came flapping into the office. He snatched the card from my fingers and looked at me with hot eyes. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“I was only checking.”

“Checking what?”

“To see if some people I know are here. Bob Brown and his wife.”

He held the card up to the light and read it, moving his lips laboriously around the easy words. “They’re here,” he said without joy. “Leastways, they were this morning.”

He gave me a doubtful look. My claim of acquaintanceship with the Browns had done nothing for my status. I tried to improve it. “Do you have a cottage vacant?”

“Ten of them. Take your pick.”

“How much?”

“Depends on if you rent by the day or the week. They’re three-fifty a day, sixteen a week.”

“I’d better check with the Browns first, see if they’re planning to stay.”

“I wouldn’t know about that. They been here three weeks.” He had a flexible worried mouth in conflict with a stupid stubborn chin. He stroked his chin as if to educate it. “I can let you have number eight for twelve a week single. That’s right next door to the Browns’ place.”

“I’ll check with them.”

“I don’t believe they’re there. You can always try.”

I went outside and down the dreary line of cottages. The door of number seven was locked. Nobody answered my repeated rapping.

When I turned away, the old man was standing in front of number eight. He beckoned to me and opened the door with a flourish:

“Take a look. I can let you have it for ten if you really like it.”

I stepped inside. The room was cold and cheerless. The inside walls were concrete block, and the same unnatural green as the outside. Through a crack in the drawn blind, yellow light slashed at the hollow bed, the threadbare carpet. I’d spent too many nights in places like it to want to spend another.

“It’s clean,” the old man said.

“I’m sure it is, Mr. Dack.”

“I cleaned it myself. But I’m not Dack, I’m Stanislaus. Dack sold out to me years ago. I just never got around to having the signs changed. What’s the use? They’ll be tearing everything down and putting up high-rise apartments pretty soon.” He smiled and stroked his bald skull as if it was a kind of golden egg. “Well, you want the cottage?”

“It really depends on Brown’s plans.”

“If I was you,” he said, “I wouldn’t let too much depend on him.”

“How is that, Mr. Stanislaus?”

“He’s kind of a blowtop, ain’t he? I mean, the way he treats that little blonde wife. I always say these things are between a man
and
his wife. But it rankles me,” he said. “I got a deep respect for women.”

“So have I. I’ve never liked the way he treated women.”

“I’m glad to hear that. A man should treat his wife with love and friendship. I lost my own wife several years ago, and I know what I’m talking about. I tried to tell him that, he told me to mind my own business. I know he’s a friend of yours—”

“He’s not exactly a friend. Is he getting worse?”

“Depends what you mean,
worse
. This very day he was slapping her around. I felt like kicking him out of my place. Only, how would that help
her?
And all she did was make a little phone call. He tries to keep her cooped up like she was in jail.” He paused, listening, as if the word
jail
had associations for him. “How long have you known this Brown?”

“Not so long,” I said vaguely. “I ran into him in Los Angeles.”

“In Hollywood?”

“Yeah. In Hollywood.”

“Is it true she was in the movies? She mentioned one day she used to be in the movies. He told her to shut up.”

“Their marriage seems to be deteriorating.”

“You can say that again.” He leaned toward me in the doorway. “I bet you she’s the one you’re interested in. I see a lot of couples, one way and another, and I’m willing to bet you she’s just about had her fill of him. If I was a young fellow like you, I’d be tempted to make her an offer.” He nudged me; the friction seemed to warm him. “She’s a red-hot little bundle.”

“I’m not young enough.”

“Sure you are.” He handled my arm, and chuckled. “It’s true she likes ’em young. I been seeing her off and on with a teen-ager, even.”

I produced the photograph of Tom that Elaine Hillman had given me. “This one?”

The old man lifted it to the daylight, at arm’s length. “Yeah. That’s a mighty good picture of him. He’s a good-looking boy.” He handed the photograph back to me, and fondled his chin. “How do you come to have a picture of him?”

I told him the truth, or part of it: “He’s a runaway from a boarding school. I’m a private detective representing the school.”

The moist gleam of lechery faded out of Stanislaus’s eyes. Something bleaker took its place, a fantasy of punishment perhaps. His whole face underwent a transformation, like quick-setting concrete.

“You can’t make me responsible for what the renters do.”

“Nobody said I could.”

He didn’t seem to hear me. “Let’s see that picture again.” I showed it to him. He shook his head over it. “I made a mistake. My eyes ain’t what they used to be. I never seen him before.”

“You made a positive identification.”

“I take it back. You were talking to me under false pretenses, trying to suck me in and get something on me. Well, you got nothing on me. It’s been tried before,” he said darkly. “And you can march yourself off my property.”

“Aren’t you going to rent me the cottage?”

He hesitated a moment, saying a silent goodbye to the ten dollars. “No sir, I want no spies and peepers in my place.”

“You may be harboring something worse.”

I think he suspected it, and the suspicion was the source of his anger.

“I’ll take my chances. Now you git. If you’re not off my property in one minute, I’m going to call the sheriff.”

That was the last thing I wanted. I’d already done enough to endanger the ransom payment and Tom’s return. I got.

A
BLUE SPORTS CAR
stood in the drive behind the Hillman Cadillac. An athletic-looking young man who looked as if he belonged in the sports car came out of the house and confronted me on the front steps. He wore an Ivy League suit and had an alligator coat slung over his arm and hand, with something bulky and gun-shaped under it.

“Point that thing away from me. I’m not armed.”

“I w-want to know who you are.” He had a faint stammer.

“Lew Archer. Who are you?”

“I’m Dick Leandro.” He spoke the words almost questioningly, as if he didn’t quite know what it meant to be Dick Leandro.

“Lower that gun,” I reminded him. “Try pointing it at your leg.”

He dropped his arm. The alligator coat slid off it, onto the flagstone steps, and I saw that he was holding a heavy old revolver. He picked up the coat and looked at me in a rather confused way. He was a handsome boy in his early twenties, with brown eyes and dark curly hair. A certain little dancing light in his eyes told me that he was aware of being handsome.

“Since you’re here,” I said, “I take it the money’s here, too.”

“Yes. I brought it out from the office several hours ago.”

“Has Hillman been given instructions for delivering it?”

He shook his head. “We’re still waiting.”

I found Ralph and Elaine Hillman in the downstairs room where the telephone was. They were sitting close together as if for warmth, on a chesterfield near the front window. The waiting had aged them both.

The evening light fell like gray paint across their faces. She was knitting something out of red wool. Her hands moved rapidly and precisely as if they had independent life.

Hillman got to his feet. He had been holding a newspaper-wrapped parcel in his lap, and he laid it down on the chesterfield, gently, like a father handling an infant.

“Hello, Archer,” he said in a monotone.

I moved toward him with some idea of comforting him. But the expression in his eyes, hurt and proud and lonely, discouraged me from touching him or saying anything very personal.

“You’ve had a long hard day.”

He nodded slowly, once. His wife let out a sound like a dry sob. “Why haven’t we heard anything from that man?”

“It’s hard to say. He seems to be putting on the screws deliberately.”

She pushed her knitting to one side, and it fell on the floor
unnoticed. Her faded pretty face wrinkled up as if she could feel the physical pressure of torture instruments. “He’s keeping us in hell, in absolute hell. But why?”

“He’s probably waiting for dark,” I said. “I’m sure you’ll be hearing from him soon. Twenty-five thousand dollars is a powerful attraction.”

“He’s welcome to the money, five times over. Why doesn’t he simply take it and give us back our boy?” Her hand flung itself out, rattling the newspaper parcel beside her.

“Don’t fret yourself, Ellie.” Hillman leaned over her and touched her pale gold hair. “There’s no use asking questions that can’t be answered. Remember, this will pass.” His words of comfort sounded hollow and forced.

“So will I,” she said wryly and bitterly, “if this keeps up much longer.”

She smoothed her face with both hands and stayed with her hands in a prayerful position at her chin. She was trembling. I was afraid she might snap like a violin string. I said to Hillman:

“May I speak to you in private? I’ve uncovered some facts you should know.”

“You can tell me in front of Elaine, and Dick for that matter.”

I noticed that Leandro was standing just inside the door.

“I prefer not to.”

“You’re not calling the shots, however.” It was a curious echo of the man on the telephone. “Let’s have your facts.”

I let him have them: “Your son has been seen consorting with a married woman named Brown. She’s a blonde, show-business type, a good deal older than he is, and she seems to have been after him for money. The chances are better than even that Mrs. Brown and her husband are involved in this extortion bid. They seem to be on their uppers—”

Elaine raised her open hands in front of her face, as if too many words were confusing her. “What do you mean, consorting?”

“He’s been hanging around with the woman, publicly and privately. They were seen together yesterday afternoon.”

“Where?” Hillman said.

“At The Barroom Floor.”

“Who says so?”

“One of their employees. He’s seen them before, and he referred to Mrs. Brown as Tom’s girl friend, the older one.’ I’ve had corroborating evidence from the man who owns the court where the Browns are living. Tom has been hanging around there, too.”

“How old is this woman?”

“Thirty or more. She’s quite an attractive dish, apparently.”

Elaine Hillman lifted her eyes. There seemed to be real horror in them. “Are you implying that Tom has been having an affair with her?”