The Far Side of the Dollar

Chapter 14

AT NINE O’CLOCK in the morning, with the taste of coffee still fresh in my mouth, I was back at the door of the lieutenant’s office. He was waiting for me.

“Did you get any sleep at all?” I said.

“Not much.”

The loss of sleep had affected him hardly at all, except that his voice and bearing were less personal and more official. “You’ve had an active twenty-four hours. I have to thank you for turning up the brother. His evidence is important, especially if this case ever gets into court.”

“I have some other evidence to show you.”

But Bastian hadn’t finished what he was saying: “I talked the sheriff into paying you twenty-five dollars per diem plus ten cents a mile, if you will submit a statement.”

“Thanks, but it can wait. You could do me a bigger favor by talking Ralph Hillman into bankrolling me.”

“I can’t do that, Archer.”

“You could tell him the facts. I’ve spent several hundred dollars of my own money, and I’ve been getting results.”

“Maybe, if I have an opportunity.”

He changed the subject abruptly: “The pathologist who did the autopsy on Mrs. Brown has come up with something that will interest you. Actual cause of death was a stab wound in the heart. It wasn’t noticed at first because it was under the breast.”

“That does interest me. It could let Harley out.”

“I don’t see it that way. He beat her and then stabbed her.”

“Do you have the weapon?”

“No. The doctor says it was a good-sized blade, thin but quite broad, and very sharp, with a sharp point. It went into her like butter, the doctor says.”

He took no pleasure in the image. His face was saturnine. “Now what was the evidence you referred to just now?”

I showed Bastian the piece of black yarn and told him where I had found it. He picked up the implication right away: “The trunk, eh? I’m afraid it doesn’t look too promising for the boy. He was last seen wearing a black sweater. I believe his mother knitted it for him.”

He studied the scrap of wool under his magnifying glass. “This looks like knitting yarn to me, too. Mrs. Hillman ought to be shown this.”

He put the piece of yarn under glass on an evidence board. Then he picked up the phone and made an appointment with the Hillmans at their house in El Rancho, an appointment for both of us. We drove out through morning fog in two cars. At the foot of the Hillmans’ driveway a man in plain clothes came out of the fog-webbed bushes and waved us on.

Mrs. Perez, wearing black shiny Sunday clothes, admitted us to the reception hall. Hillman came out of the room where the bar was. His movements were somnambulistic and precise, as if they were controlled by some external power. His eyes were still too bright.

He shook hands with Bastian and, after some hesitation, with me. “Come into the sitting room, gentlemen. It’s good of you to make the trip out here. Elaine simply wasn’t up to going downtown. If I could only get her to eat,” he said.

She was sitting on the chesterfield near the front window. The morning light was unkind to her parched blonde face. It was two full days and nights since the first telephone call on Monday morning. She looked as if all the minutes in those forty-eight hours had passed through her body like knots in wire. The red piece of knitting on the seat beside her hadn’t grown since I’d seen it last.

She managed a rather wizened smile and extended her hand to Bastian. “Ralph says you have something to show me.”

“Yes. It’s a piece of yarn, which may or may not have come off your boy’s sweater.”

“The black one I knitted for him?”

“It may be. We want to know if you recognize the yarn.”

Bastian handed her the evidence board. She put on reading glasses and examined it. Then she put it aside, rose abruptly, and left the room. Hillman made a move to follow her. He stopped with his hands out in a helpless pose which he was still in when she returned.

She was carrying a large, figured linen knitting bag. Crouching on the chesterfield, she rummaged among its contents and tossed out balls of wool of various colors. Her furiously active hand came to rest holding a half-used ball of black wool.

“This is what I had left over from Tom’s sweater. I think it’s the same. Can you tell?”

Bastian broke off a piece of yarn from the ball and compared it under a glass with my piece. He turned from the window: “The specimens appear identical to me. If they are, we can establish it under the microscope.”

“What does it mean if they are identical?” Ralph Hillman said.

“I prefer not to say until we have microscopic confirmation.”

Hillman took hold of Bastian’s arm and shook him. “Don’t double-talk me, Lieutenant.”

Bastian broke loose and stepped back. There were white frozen-looking patches around his nose and mouth. His eyes were somber.

“Very well, I’ll tell you what I know. This piece of yarn was found by Mr. Archer here, caught in the lock of a car trunk. The car was one driven by the alleged kidnapper, Harley.”

“You mean that Tom was riding in the trunk?”

“He may have been, yes.”

“But he wouldn’t do that if–” Hillman’s mouth worked. “You mean Tom is dead?”

“He may be. We won’t jump to any conclusions.”

Elaine Hillman produced a noise, a strangled gasp, which made her the center of attention. She spoke in a thin voice, halfway between a child’s and an old woman’s: “I wish I had never recognized the yarn.”

“It wouldn’t change the facts, Mrs. Hillman.”

“Well, I don’t want any more of your dreadful facts. The waiting is bad enough, without these refinements of torment.”

Hillman bent over and tried to quiet her. “That isn’t fair, Elaine. Lieutenant Bastian is trying to help us.”

He had said the same thing about me. It gave me the queer feeling that time was repeating itself and would go on endlessly repeating itself, as it does in hell.

She said: “He’s going about it in a strange way. Look what he’s made me do. All my balls of yarn are spilled on the floor.”

She kicked at them with her tiny slippered feet.

Hillman got down on his knees to pick them up. She kicked at him, without quite touching him. “Get away, you’re no help, either. If you’d been a decent father, this would never have happened.”

Bastian picked up the evidence board and turned to me. “We’d better go.”

Nobody asked us not to. But Hillman followed us out into the hall.

“Please forgive us, we’re not ourselves. You haven’t really told me anything.”

Bastian answered him coolly: “We have no definite conclusions to report.”

“But you think Tom’s dead.”

“I’m afraid he may be. We’ll learn more from an analysis of the contents of that car trunk. If you’ll excuse me, Mr. Hillman, I don’t have time for further explanations now.”

“I do,” I said.

For the first time that morning Hillman looked at me as if I might be good for something more than a scapegoat. “Are you willing to tell me what’s been going on?”

“So far as I understand it.”

“I’ll leave you men together then,” Bastian said. He went out, and a minute later I heard his car go down the drive.

Hillman deputed Mrs. Perez to stay with his wife. He led me into a wing of the house I hadn’t visited, down an arching corridor like a tunnel carved through chalk, to a spacious study. Two of the oak-paneled walls were lined with books, most of them in calf-bound sets, as if Hillman had bought or inherited a library. A third wall was broken by a large deep window overlooking the distant sea.

The fourth wall was hung with a number of framed photographs. One was a blownup snapshot of Dick Leandro crouching in the cockpit of a racing yacht with his hand on the helm and the white wake boiling at his back. One showed a group of Navy fliers posing together on a flight deck. I recognized a younger Hillman on the far right of the group. There were other similar pictures, taken ashore and afloat; one of a torpedo-bomber squadron flying formation in old World War II Devastators; one of an escort carrier photographed from far overhead, so that it lay like a shingle on the bright, scarified water.

It seemed to me that Hillman had brought me to this specific room, this wall, for a purpose. The somnambulistic precision of his movements was probably controlled by the deep unconscious. At any rate, we were developing the same idea at the same time, and the photographer of the escort carrier was the catalyst.

“That was my last ship,” Hillman said. “The fact is, for a few weeks at the end I commanded her.”

“A few weeks at the end of the war?”

“A few weeks at her end. The war was long since over. We took her from Dago through the Canal to Boston and put her in mothballs.”

His voice was tender and regretful. He might have been talking about the death of a woman.

“She wasn’t the Perry Bay by any chance?”

“Yes.”

He swung around to look at me. “You’ve heard of her?”

“Just last night. This whole things is coming together, Mr. Hillman. Does the name Mike Harley mean anything to you?”

His eyes blurred. “I’m afraid you’re confusing me. The name you mentioned earlier was Harold Harley.”

“I had the wrong name. Harold is Mike’s brother, and he’s the one I talked to last night. He told me Mike served on the Perry Bay.”

Hillman nodded slowly. “I remember Mike Harley. I have reason to. He caused me a lot of trouble. In the end I had to recommend an undesirable discharge.”

“For stealing a Navy camera.”

He gave me a swift responsive look. “You do your homework thoroughly, Mr. Archer. Actually we let him off easy, because he wasn’t quite responsible. He could have been sent to Portsmouth for stealing that expensive camera.”

He backed up into a chair and sat down suddenly, as if he’d been struck by the full impact of the past. “So eighteen years later he has to steal my son.”

I stood by the window and waited for him to master the immense coincidence. It was no coincidence in the usual sense, of course. Hillman had been in authority over Harley, and had given Harley reason to hate him. I had heard the hatred speak on the telephone Monday.

The fog over the sea was burning off. Ragged blue holes opened and closed in the grayness. Hillman came to the window and stood beside me. His face was more composed, except for the fierce glitter of his eyes.

“When I think of what that man has done to me,” he said. “Tell me the rest of it, Archer. All you know.”

I told him the rest of it. He listened as if I was an oracle telling him the story of his future life. He seemed particularly interested in the murdered woman, Carol, and I asked him if he had ever met her.

He shook his head. “I didn’t know Harley was married.”

“The marriage may not have been legal. But it lasted.”

“Did Harley have children?”

“One at least.”

“How could a man with a child of his own–?”

He didn’t finish the thought. Another thought rushed in on his excited mind: “At any rate this disposes of the notion that Tom was mixed up with the woman.”

“Not necessarily. Harley could have been using her as bait.”

“But that’s fantastic. The woman must be– have been old enough to be his mother.”

“Still, she wasn’t an old woman. She was born about 1930.”

“And you’re seriously suggesting that Tom had an affair with her?”

“It’s an academic question under the circumstances, Mr. Hillman.”

His patrician head turned slowly toward me, catching the light on its flat handsome planes. The days were carving him like sculpture. “You mean the fact that Tom is dead.”

“It isn’t a fact yet. It is a strong possibility.”

“If my boy were alive, wouldn’t he have come home by now?”

“Not if he’s deliberately staying away.”

“Do you have reason to believe that he is?”

“Nothing conclusive, but several facts suggest the possibility. He was seen with the woman on Sunday, under his own power. And he did run away in the first place.”

“From Laguna Perdida School. Not from us.”

“He may expect to be clapped back into the school if he returns.”

“Good Lord, I’d never do that.”

“You did it once.”

“I was forced to by circumstances.”

“What were the circumstances, Mr. Hillman?”

“There’s no need to go into them. As you would say, the question is academic.”

“Did he attempt suicide?”

“No.”

“Homicide?”

His eyes flickered. “Certainly not.”

He changed the subject hurriedly: “We shouldn’t be standing here talking. If Thomas is alive, he’s got to be found. Harley is the one man who must know where he is, and you tell me Harley is probably on his way to Nevada.”

“He’s probably there by now.”

“Why aren’t you? I’d fly you myself if I could leave my wife. But you can charter a plane.”

I explained that this took money, of which I’d already spent a fair amount in his behalf.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t realize.”

He produced the two-thousand-dollar check that Dr. Sponti and Mr. Squerry had given him on Monday, and endorsed it to me. I was back in business.