The Far Side of the Dollar

Chapter 10

MORNING WAS WELCOME, in spite of the pain in my head. I couldn’t remember eating anything but Mrs. Perez’s cheese sandwich since the previous morning. The tepid coffee and over-scrambled eggs tasted like nectar and ambrosia.

I was finishing breakfast when Dr. Sponti arrived, breathing rapidly and audibly. His plump face bore the marks of a bad night. He had sleepless bruises around the eyes, and a gash in his upper lip where his razor had slipped. The chilly hand he offered me reminded me of the dead woman’s, and I dropped it.

“I’m surprised you knew I was here.”

“I found out in a rather circuitous way. A Lieutenant Bastian phoned me in the middle of the night. Evidently he saw the check I gave you yesterday morning. He asked me a great many questions.”

“About me?”

“About the whole situation involving you and Tom Hillman.”

“You told him about Tom Hillman?”

“I had no choice, really.”

He picked at the fresh scab on his lip. “A woman has been murdered in Ocean View. I was honor bound to provide the authorities with all the information I could. After all–”

“Does this include the business of the ransom money?”

“Naturally it does. Lieutenant Bastian considered it highly important. He thanked me effusively, and promised that the name of the school would be kept out of the papers.”

“Which is the main thing.”

“It is to me,” Sponti said. “I’m in the school business.”

It was frustrating to have held out for nothing, and to have no secrets to trade with Bastian. But it was relieving, too, that the thing was out in the open. Hillman’s imposition of silence had made it hard for me to do my job. I said: “Have you had any repercussions from Ralph Hillman?”

“He phoned early this morning. The boy is still on the missing list.”

Sponti’s voice was lugubrious, and his eyes rolled heavily toward me. “The parents are naturally quite frantic by this time. Mr. Hillman said things I’m sure he’ll regret later.”

“Is he still blaming you for the kidnapping?”

“Yes, and he blames me for bringing you into the case. He seems to feel you broke faith with him, shall we say.”

“By going to the auto court and getting myself shot?”

“You frightened off the kidnappers, in his opinion, and prevented them from returning his son to him. I’m very much afraid he wants nothing more to do with you, Mr. Archer.”

“And neither do you?”

Dr. Sponti pursed his lips and brought his ten fingers together in the air. They made a Norman arch and then a Gothic one. “I’m sure you understand the pressures I’m under. I’m virtually obliged to do as Mr. Hillman wishes in his extremity.”

“Sure.”

“And I’m not going to ask you to refund any part of your check. The entire two hundred and fifty dollars is yours, even though you’ve been in my employ” – he looked at his watch – “considerably less than twenty-four hours. The unearned surplus will take care of your medical expenses, I’m sure.”

He was backing toward the door. “Well, I have to run.”

“Go to hell,” I said as he went out.

He poked his head in again: “You may regret saying that. I’m tempted to stop payment on that check after all.”

I made an obscene suggestion as to the disposition of the check. Dr. Sponti turned as blue as a Santa Clara plum and went away. I lay and enjoyed my anger for a while. It went so nicely with the reciprocating ache in my head. And it helped to cover over the fact that I had let myself in for this. I shouldn’t have gone the second time to Dack’s Auto Court, at least not when I did.

A nurse’s aide came in and took away my tray. Later a doctor palpated my skull, looked into my eyes with a tiny light, and told me I probably had a slight concussion but so had a lot of other people walking around. I borrowed a safety razor from an orderly, shaved and dressed, and went down to the cashier’s window and paid my bill with Sponti’s check.

I got over two hundred dollars change. Riding downtown in a taxi, I decided I could afford to spend another day on the case, whether Dr. Sponti liked it or not. I told the driver to let me off at the Telephone Company.

“You said the courthouse.”

“The telephone company. We’ve had a change of plan.”

“You should have said so in the first place.”

“Forgive my failure of leadership.”

I was feeling bitter and bright. It had to do with the weather, which had turned sunny, but more to do with my decision to spend my own time on a boy I’d never seen. I didn’t tip the driver.

One end of the main public room in the telephone building was lined with long-distance booths and shelves of out-of-town directories. Only the main cities in Idaho, like Boise and Pocatello and Idaho Falls, were represented. I looked through their directories, for a photographer named Harold Harley. He wasn’t listed. Robert Brown was, by the legion, but the name was almost certainly an alias.

I installed myself in one of the booths and placed a long-distance call to Arnie Walters, a Reno detective who often worked with me. I had no Idaho contact, and Reno was on the fastest route to Idaho. Reno itself had a powerful attraction for thieves with sudden money.

“Walters Agency,” Arnie said.

“This is Lew.”

I told him where I was calling from, and why.

“You come up with some dillies. Murder and kidnapping, eh?”

“The kidnapping may be a phony. Tom Hillman, the supposed victim, has been palling around with the murdered woman for a couple of weeks.”

“How old did you say he was?”

“Seventeen. He’s big for his age.”

I described Tom Hillman in detail. “He may be traveling with Brown either voluntarily or involuntarily.”

“Or not traveling at all?” Arnie said.

“Or not traveling at all.”

“You know this boy?”

“No.”

“I thought maybe you knew him. Okay. Where does this photographer Harold Harley come in?”

“Harley may be Brown himself, or he may know Brown. His card is the only real lead I have so far. That and the Idaho license. I want you to do two things. Check Idaho and adjoining states for Harley. You have the business directories, don’t you?”

“Yeah, I’ll get Phyllis on them.”

She was his wife and partner.

“The other thing, I want you to look out for Brown and the boy, you and your informers in Tahoe and Vegas.”

“What makes you think they’re headed in this direction?”

“It’s a hunch. The woman had a silver dollar and a loaded dice in her purse.”

“And no identification?”

“Whoever did her in got rid of everything she had in that line. But we’ll identify her. We have her.”

“Let me know when you do.”

I walked across down to the courthouse, under a sky that yesterday’s rain had washed clean. I asked the deputy on duty in the sheriff’s department where to find Lieutenant Bastian. He directed me to the identification laboratory on the second floor.

It was more office than laboratory, a spacious room with pigeons murmuring on the window ledges. The walls were crowded with filing cabinets and hung with maps of the city and county and state. A large adjacent closet was fitted out as a darkroom, with drying racks and a long metal sink.

Bastian got up smiling. His smile wasn’t greatly different from last night’s frown. He laid down a rectangular magnifying glass on top of the photograph he had been studying. Leaning across the desk to take his outstretched hand, I could see that it was a picture of Mrs. Brown in death.

“What killed her, Lieutenant?” I said when we were seated.

“This.”

He held up his right hand and clenched it. His face clenched with it. “The human hand.”

“Robert Brown’s?”

“It looks like it. He gave her a beating early yesterday afternoon, according to Stanislaus. The deputy coroner says she’s been dead that long.”

“Stanislaus told me they quarreled over a telephone call she made.”

“That’s right. We haven’t been able to trace the call, which means it was probably local. She used the phone in Stanislaus’s office, but he claims to know nothing more about it.”

“How does he know Brown gave her a beating?” I said.

“He says a neighbor woman told him. That checks out.”

Bastian wiped his left hand across his tense angry face, without really changing his expression. “It’s terrible the way some people live, that a woman could be killed within a neighbor’s hearing and nobody knows or cares.”

“Not even Brown,” I said. “He thought she was alive at nine-thirty last night. He talked to her through the door, trying to get her to open up. Or he may have been trying to con himself into thinking he hadn’t killed her after all. I don’t think he’s too stable.”

Bastian looked up sharply. “Were you in the cottage when Brown was talking through the door?”

“I was. Incidentally, I recognized his voice. He’s the same man who extorted twenty-five thousand dollars from Ralph Hillman last night. I listened in on a phone call he made to Hillman yesterday.”

Bastian’s right fist was still clenched. He used it to strike the desk top, savagely. The pigeons on the window ledge flew away.

“It’s too damn bad,” he said, “you didn’t bring us in on this yesterday. You might have saved a life, not to mention twenty-five thousand dollars.”

“Tell that to Hillman.”

“I intend to. This morning. Right now I’m telling you.”

“The decision wasn’t mine. I tried to change it. Anyway, I entered the case after the woman was killed.”

“That’s a good place to begin,” Bastian said after a pause. “Go on from there. I want the full record.”

He reached down beside his desk and turned on a recorder. For an hour or more the tape slithered quietly from wheel to wheel as I talked into it. I was client-less and free and I didn’t suppress anything. Not even the possibility that Tom Hillman had cooperated with Brown in extorting money from his father.

“I’d almost like to think that that was true,” Bastian said. “It would mean that the kid is still alive, anyway. But it isn’t likely.”

“Which isn’t likely?”

“Both things. I doubt that he hoaxed his old man, and I doubt that he’s still alive. It looks as if the woman was used as a decoy to get him in position for the kill. We’ll probably find his body in the ocean week after next.”

His words had the weight of experience behind them. Kidnap victims were poor actuarial risks. But I said: “I’m working on the assumption that he’s alive.”

Bastian raised his eyebrows. “I thought Dr. Sponti took you off the case.”

“I still have some of his money.”

Bastian gave me a long cool appraising look. “LA was right. You’re not the usual peeper.”

“I hope not.”

“If you’re staying with it, you can do something for me, as well as for yourself. Help me to get this woman identified.”

He slid the picture of Mrs. Brown out from under the magnifying glass. “This postmortem photo is too rough to circularize. But you could show it around in the right circles. I’m having a police artist make a composite portrait, but that takes time.”

“What about fingerprints?”

“We’re trying that, too, but a lot of women have never been fingerprinted. Meantime, will you try and get an identification? You’re a Hollywood man, and the woman claimed that she was in pictures at one time.”

“That doesn’t mean a thing.”

“It might.”

“But I was planning to try and pick up Brown’s trail in Nevada. If the boy’s alive, Brown knows where to find him.”

“The Nevada police already have our APB on Brown. And you have a private operative on the spot. Frankly, I’d appreciate it if you’ll take this picture to Hollywood with you. I don’t have a man I can spare. By the way, I had your car brought into the county garage.”

Cooperation breeds cooperation. Besides, the woman’s identity was important, if only because the killer had tried to hide it. I accepted the picture, along with several others taken from various angles, and put them in the same pocket as my picture of Tom.

“You can reverse any telephone charges,” Bastian said in farewell.

Halfway down the stairs I ran into Ralph Hillman. At first glance he looked fresher than he had the previous evening. But it was an illusory freshness. The color in his cheeks was hectic, and the sparkle in his eyes was the glint of desperation. He sort of reared back when he saw me, like a spooked horse.

“Can you give me a minute, Mr. Hillman?”

“Sorry. I have an appointment.”

“The lieutenant can wait. I want to say this. I admit I made a mistake last night. But you made a mistake in getting Sponti to drop me.”

He looked at me down his patrician nose. “You’d naturally think so. It’s costing you money.”

“Look, I’m sorry about last night. I was overeager. That’s the defect of a virtue. I want to carry on with the search for your son.”

“What’s the use? He’s probably dead. Thanks to you.”

“That’s a fairly massive accusation, Mr. Hillman.”

“Take it. It’s yours. And please get out of my way.”

He looked compulsively at his wristwatch. “I’m already late.”

He brushed past me and ran upstairs as if I might pursue him. It wasn’t a pleasant interview. The unpleasantness stuck in my crop all the way to Los Angeles.