The Far Side of the Dollar

Chapter 9

I WENT THROUGH the house to the kitchen and asked Mrs. Perez to make me a plain cheese sandwich. She grumbled, but she made it. I ate it leaning against the refrigerator. Mrs. Perez wouldn’t talk about the trouble in the family. She seemed to have a superstitious feeling that trouble was only amplified by words. When I tried to question her about Tom’s habits, she gradually lost her ability to understand my English.

Dick Leandro had gone upstairs to sit with Elaine. He seemed more at home than Tom appeared to have been with his own family. I went out through the reception hall. It was nine o’clock, and I couldn’t wait any longer.

Driving along the highway to Ocean View, I argued jesuitically with myself that I had stayed clear of the money-drop, I wasn’t double-dealing with Hillman, who wasn’t my client in any case, and besides I had no proof that Mrs. Brown and her husband were connected with the extortion attempt.

It was deep night over the sea, moonless and starless. I left my car at a view-point near Dack’s Auto Court. The sea was a hollow presence with a voice. I hiked down the access road to the court, not using the flashlight that I carried with me.

The office was lighted and had a neon “Vacancy” sign above the door. Avoiding the spill of light from it, I went straight to cottage number seven. It was dark. I knocked, and got no answer. I let myself in with the key I had and closed the self-locking door behind me.

Mrs. Brown was waiting; I stumbled over her foot and almost fell on top of her before I switched on my flashlight. She lay in her winking sequined gown under the jittery beam. Blood was tangled like tar in her bright hair. Her face was mottled with bruises, and misshapen. She looked as though she had been beaten to death.

I touched her hand. She was cold. I turned the light away from her lopsided grin.

The beam jumped around the green walls, the newspaper littered floor. It found a large strapped canvas suitcase standing at the foot of the bed with two paper bags beside it. One of the bags contained a bottle of cheap wine, the other sandwiches that were drying out.

I unstrapped the suitcase and opened it. An odor rose from its contents like sour regret. Men’s and women’s things were bundled indiscriminately together, dirty shirts and soiled slips, a rusting safety razor and a dabbled jar of cold cream and a bottle of mascara, a couple of dresses and some lingerie, a man’s worn blue suit with a chain-store label and nothing in the pockets but tobacco powder and, tucked far down in the outer breast pocket, a creased yellow business card poorly printed on cheap paper:

HAROLD ‘HAR’ HARLEY

Application Photos Our Specialty

I found the woman’s imitation snakeskin purse on a chair by the side window. It contained a jumble of cosmetics and some frayed blue chip stamps. No wallet, no identification, no money except for a single silver dollar in the bottom of the bag. There were also a pack of cards, slick with the oil of human hands, and a dice which came up six all three times I rolled it.

I heard a car approaching, and headlights swept the window on the far side. I switched off my flashlight. The wheels of the car crunched in the gravel and came to a halt directly in front of the cottage. Someone got out of the car and turned the cottage doorknob. When the door refused to open, a man’s voice said: “Let me in.”

It was the slightly wheezing, whining voice I’d heard that afternoon on Hillman’s phone. I moved toward the door with the dark flashlight raised in my hand. The man outside rattled the knob.

“I know you’re in there, I saw the light. This is no time to carry a grudge, hon.”

The woman lay in her deep waiting silence. I stepped around her and stood against the wall beside the door. I shifted the flash to my left hand and fumbled for the spring lock with my right.

“I hear you, damn you. You want another taste of what you had today?”

He waited, and then said: “If you won’t open the door, I’ll shoot the lock out.”

I heard the click of a hammer. I stayed where I was beside the door, holding the flashlight like a club. But he didn’t fire.

“On the other hand,” he said, “there’s nothing in there I need, including you. You can stay here on your can if you want to. Make up your mind right now.”

He waited. He couldn’t outwait her.

“This is your last chance. I’ll count to three. If you don’t open up, I’m traveling alone.”

He counted, one, two, three, but it would take bigger magic to reach her. “Good riddance to bad rubbish,” he said.

His footsteps moved away on the stones. The car door creaked. I couldn’t let him go.

I snapped back the lock and opened the door and rushed him. His shadowy hatted figure was halfway into his car, with one foot on the ground. He whirled. The gun was still in his hand. It gave out a hot little flame. I could feel it sear me.

I staggered across the gravel and got hold of his twisting body. He hammered my hands loose with the butt of his gun. I had blood in my eyes, and I couldn’t avoid the gun butt when it smashed into my skull. A kind of chandelier lit up in my head and then crashed down into darkness.

Next thing I was a VIP traveling with a police guard in the back of a chauffeured car. The turban I could feel on my head suggested to the joggled brain under it that I was a rajah or a maharajah. We turned into a driveway under a red light, which excited me. Perhaps I was being taken to see one of my various concubines.

I raised the question with the uniformed men sitting on either side of me. Gently but firmly, they helped me out of the patrol car and walked me through swinging doors, which a man in white held open, into a glaring place that smelled of disinfectants.

They persuaded me to sit down on a padded table and then to lie down. My heart hurt. I felt it with my hands. It had a towel around it, sticky with blood.

A large young face with a moustache leaned over me upside down. Large hairy hands removed the towel and did some probing and scouring in my scalp. It stung.

“You’re a lucky man. It parted your hair for you, kind of permanently.”

“How bad is it, Doctor?”

“The bullet wound isn’t serious, just a crease. As I said, you’re lucky. This other lesion is going to take longer to heal. What did you get hit with?”

“Gun butt. I think.”

“More fun and games,” he said.

“Did they catch him?”

“You’ll have to ask them. They haven’t told me a thing.”

He clipped parts of my head and put some clamps in it and gave me a drink of water and an aspirin. Then he left me lying alone in the white-partitioned cubicle. My two guards moved rapidly into the vacuum.

They were sheriff’s men, wearing peaked hats and tan uniforms. They were young and hearty, with fine animal bodies and rather animal, not so fine, faces. Good earnest boys, but a little dull. They said they wanted to help me.

“Why did you kill her?” the dark one said.

“I didn’t. She’d been dead for some time when I found her.”

“That doesn’t let you out. Mr. Stanislaus said you were there earlier in the day.”

“He was with me all the time.”

“That’s what you say,” the fair one said.

This repartee went on for some time, like a recording of an old vaudeville act, which some collector had unwisely preserved. I tried to question them. They wouldn’t tell me anything. My head was feeling worse, but oddly enough I began to think better with it. I even managed to get up on my elbows and look at them on the level.

“I’m a licensed private detective from Los Angeles.”

“We know that,” the dark one said.

I felt for my wallet. It was missing. “Give me my wallet.”

“You’ll get it back all in good time. Nobody’s going to steal it.”

“I want to talk to the sheriff.”

“He’s in bed asleep.”

“Is there a captain or lieutenant on duty?”

“The lieutenant is busy at the scene of the crime. You can talk to him in the morning. The doctor says you stay here overnight. Concussion. What did the woman hit you with, anyway?”

“Her husband hit me, with a gun butt.”

“I hardly blame him,” the fair one said emotionally, “after what you did to his wife.”

“Were you shacked up with her?” the dark one said.

I looked from one healthy smooth face to the other. They didn’t look sadistic, or sound corrupt, and I wasn’t afraid for myself. Sooner or later the mess would be straightened out. But I was afraid.

“Listen,” I said, “you’re wasting time on me. I had legitimate business at the court. I was investigating–” The fear came up in my throat and choked off the rest of the sentence. It was fear for the boy.

“Investigating what?” the dark one said.

“Law enforcement in this country. It stinks.”

I wasn’t feeling too articulate.

“We’ll law-enforcement you,” the dark one said. He was broad, with muscular shoulders. He moved them around in the air a little bit and pretended to catch a fly just in front of my face.

“Lay off, muscle,” I said.

The large, moustached face of the doctor appeared in the entrance to the cubicle. “Everything okay in here?”

I said above the deputies’ smiling assurances: “I want to make a phone call.”

The doctor looked doubtfully from me to the officers. “I don’t know about that.”

“I’m a private detective investigating a crime. I’m not free to talk about it without the permission of my principal. I want to call him.”

“There’s no facilities for that,” the dark deputy said.

“How about it, Doctor? You’re in charge here, and I have a legal right to make a phone call.”

He was a very young man behind his moustache. “I don’t know. There’s a telephone booth down the hall. Do you think you can make it?”

“I never felt better in my life.”

But when I swung my legs down, the floor seemed distant and undulant. The deputies had to help me to the booth and prop me up on the stool inside of it. I pulled the folding door shut. Their faces floated outside the wired glass like bulbous fishes, a dark one and a fair one, nosing around a bathyscaph on the deep ocean floor.

Technically Dr. Sponti was my principal, but it was Ralph Hillman’s number I asked Information for. I had a dime in my pocket, fortunately, and Hillman was there. He answered the phone himself on the first ring: “Yes?”

“This is Archer.” He groaned.

“Have you heard anything from Tom?” I said.

“No. I followed instructions to the letter, and when I came up from the beach the money was gone. He’s double-crossed me,” he said bitterly.

“Did you see him?”

“No. I made no attempt to.”

“I did.”

I told Hillman what had happened, to me and to Mrs. Brown.

His voice came thin and bleak over the wire. “And you think these are the same people?”

“I think Brown’s your man. Brown is probably an alias. Does the name Harold Harley mean anything to you?”

“What was that again?”

“Harold or ‘Har’ Harley. He’s a photographer.”

“I never heard of him.”

I wasn’t surprised. Harley’s yellow card was the kind that businessmen distributed by the hundred, and had no necessary connection with Brown.

“Is that all you wanted?” Hillman said. “I’m trying to keep this line open.”

“I haven’t got to the main thing. The police are on my back. I can’t explain what I was doing at the auto court without dragging in the extortion bit, and your son.”

“Can’t you give them a story?”

“It wouldn’t be wise. This is a capital case, a double one.”

“Are you trying to tell me that Tom is dead?”

“I meant that kidnapping is a capital crime. But you are dealing with a killer. I think at this point you should level with the police, and get their help. Sooner or later I’m going to have to level with them.”

“I forbid–” He changed his tone, and started the sentence over: “I beg of you, please hold off: Give him until morning to come home. He’s my only son.”

“All right. Till morning. We can’t bottle it up any longer than that, and we shouldn’t.”

I hung up and stepped out into the corridor. Instead of taking me back to the emergency ward, my escort took me up in an elevator to a special room with heavy screens on the windows. They let me lie down on the bed, and took turns questioning me. It would be tedious to recount the dialogue. It was tedious at the time, and I didn’t listen to all of it.

Some time around midnight a sheriffs lieutenant named Bastian came into the room and ordered the deputies out into the hall. He was a tall man, with iron-gray hair clipped short. The vertical grooves in his cheeks looked like the scars inflicted by a personal discipline harsher than saber cuts.

He stood over me frowning. “Dr. Murphy says you’re feeling critical of law enforcement in this county.”

“I’ve had reason.”

“It isn’t easy recruiting men at the salaries the supervisors are willing to pay. We can hardly compete with the wages for unskilled labor. And this is a tough job.”

“It has its little extra compensations.”

“What does that mean?”

“I seem to be missing my wallet.”

Bastian’s face went grim. He marched out into the hall, made some remarks in a voice that buzzed like a hornet, and came back carrying my wallet. I counted the money in it, rather obtrusively.

“It was used to check you out,” Bastian said. “LA County gives you a good rating, and I’m sorry if you weren’t treated right.”

“Think nothing of it. I’m used to being pushed around by unskilled labor.”

“You heard me apologize,” he said, in a tone that closed the subject.

Bastian asked me a number of questions about Mrs. Brown and the reason for my interest in her. I told him I’d have to check with my client in the morning, before I could open up. Then he wanted everything I could give him about Brown’s appearance and car.

The moments before and after the shot were vague in my memory. I dredged up what I could. Brown was a man of better than medium size, physically powerful, not young, not old. He was wearing a dark gray or blue jacket and a wide-brimmed grayish hat which shadowed his eyes. The lower part of his face was heavy jawed. His voice was rough, with a slight wheeze in it. The car was a dirty white or tan two-door sedan, probably a Ford, about eight years old.

I learned two facts from Lieutenant Bastian: the car had an Idaho license, according to other tenants of the court, and Stanislaus was in trouble for keeping no record of the license number. I think Bastian gave me these facts in the hope of loosening my tongue. But he finally agreed to wait till morning.

They shifted me to another room on the same floor, unguarded. I spent a good part of the night, waking and sleeping, watching a turning wheel of faces. The faces were interspersed from time to time with brilliant visions of Dack’s Auto Court. Its green ugliness was held in the selective sunset glare, as if it was under a judgment, and so was I.