The Far Side of the Dollar

Chapter 15

STELLA, IN HER hooded bluejacket, was waiting for me part way down the driveway. The girl had a heavy pair of binoculars hung around her neck on a strap. Her face was bloodless and thin, as if it had provided sustenance for her eyes.

When I stopped the car, she climbed uninvited into the seat beside me. “I’ve been watching for you.”

“Is that what the field glasses are for?”

She nodded gravely. “I watch everybody who comes in or goes out of Tommy’s house. Mother thinks I’m bird-watching, which she lets me do because it’s a status-symbol activity. Actually I am doing a bird study for next year’s biology class, on the nesting habits of the acorn woodpeckers. Only they all look so much alike they’re hard to keep track of.”

“So are people.”

“I’m finding that out.”

She leaned toward me. Her small breast brushed my shoulder like a gift of trust. “But you know what, Mr. Archer? Tommy tried to call me this morning, I’m almost certain.”

“Tell me about it.”

“There isn’t much to tell, really. It was one of those calls with nobody on the other end of the line. My mother answered the phone, and that’s why Tommy didn’t speak. He wanted me to answer it.”

Her eyes were luminous with hope.

“What makes you think it was Tommy?”

“I just know it was. Besides, he called at five to eight, which is the exact same time he always used to call me in the morning. He used to pick me up and drive me to school.”

“That isn’t too much to go on, Stella. More likely it was a wrong number.”

“No. I believe it was Tommy. And he’ll be trying again.”

“Why would he call you instead of his parents?”

“He’s probably afraid to call them. He must be in serious trouble.”

“You can be sure of that, one way or another.”

I was only trying to moderate her hopefulness, but I frightened her. She said in a hushed voice: “You’ve found out something.”

“Nothing definite. We’re on the track of the kidnapper. And incidentally, I have to be on my way.”

She held me with her eyes. “He really was kidnapped then? He didn’t go to them of his own accord or anything like that?”

“He may have in the first place. After that, I don’t know. Did Tommy ever mention a woman named Carol?”

“The woman who was killed?”

“Yes.”

“He never did. Why? Did he know her?”

“He knew her very well.”

She caught my implication and shook her head. “I don’t believe it.”

“That doesn’t prevent it from being true, Stella. Didn’t you ever see them together?”

I got out my collection of pictures and selected the one that Harold Harley had taken of Carol in 1945. The girl studied it. She said with something like awe in her voice: “She’s– she was very beautiful. She couldn’t have been much older than I am.”

“She wasn’t, when the picture was taken. But that was a long time ago, and you should make allowances for that.”

“I’ve never seen her. I’m sure. And Tommy never said a word about her.”

She looked at me glumly. “People are hard to keep track of.”

She handed me the picture as if it was heavy and hot and would spill if it was tilted.

At this point a female moose deprived of her calf, or something closely resembling her, came crashing through the oak woods. It was Stella’s mother. Her handsome red head was tousled and her face was brutalized by anxiety. She spotted Stella and charged around to her side of the car. Stella turned up the window and snapped the lock.

Rhea Carlson rapped on the glass with her fist. “Come out of there. What do you think you’re doing?”

“Talking to Mr. Archer.”

“You must be crazy. Are you trying to ruin yourself?”

“I don’t care what happens to me, that’s true.”

“You have no right to talk like that. You’re ungrateful!”

“Ungrateful for what?”

“I gave you life, didn’t I? Your father and I have given you everything.”

“I don’t want everything. I just want to be alone, Mother.”

“No! You come out of there.”

“I don’t have to.”

“Yes you do,” I said.

Stella looked at me as if I had betrayed her to the enemy.

“She’s your mother,” I said, “and you’re a minor, and if you don’t obey her you’re out of control, and I’m contributing to the delinquency of a minor.”

“You are?”

“Reluctantly,” I said.

The word persuaded her. She even gave me a little half-smile. Then she unlocked the door and climbed out of the car. I got out and walked around to their side. Rhea Carlson looked at me as if I might be on the point of assaulting her.

“Calm down, Mrs. Carlson. Nothing’s happened.”

“Oh? Would you know?”

“I know that no harm will ever come to Stella if I’m around. May I ask you a question?”

She hesitated. “I won’t promise to answer it.”

“You received a phone call this morning at five to eight. Was it local or long distance?”

“I don’t know. Most of our long-distance calls are dialed direct.”

“Was anything said?”

“I said hello.”

“I mean on the other end of the line.”

“No. Not a word.”

“Did whoever it was hang up?”

“Yes, and I’m sure it wasn’t the Hillman boy. It was just another stupid mistake in dialing. We get them all the time.”

“It was so Tommy,” Stella said. “I know it.”

“Don’t believe her. She’s always making things up.”

“I am not.”

Stella looked ready to cry.

“Don’t contradict me, Stella. Why do you always have to contradict me?”

“I don’t.”

“You do.”

I stepped between them. “Your daughter’s a good girl, and she’s almost a woman. Please try to bear that in mind, and treat her gently.”

Mrs. Carlson said in scornful desperation: “What do you know about mothers and daughters? Who are you, anyway?”

“I’ve been a private detective since the war. In the course of time you pick up a few primitive ideas about people, and you develop an instinct for the good ones. Like Stella.”

Stella blushed. Her mother peered at me without understanding. In my rear-view mirror, as I started away, I saw them walking down the driveway, far apart. It seemed a pity. For all I knew, Rhea Carlson was a good girl, too.

I drove downtown, and took Sponti’s two-thousand-dollar check to the bank it was drawn on. I endorsed it, under Ralph Hillman’s signature: “With many thanks, Lew Archer.”

It was a weak riposte for being fired, but it gave me some satisfaction to think that it might bring out the purple in Dr. Sponti’s face.

The transfusion of cash made me feel mobile and imaginative. Just on a hunch, I drove back to Harold Harley’s place in Long Beach. It was a good hunch. Lila answered the door.

She had on an apron and a dusting cap, and she pushed a strand of black hair up under the cap. Her breast rose with the gesture. Lila wasn’t a pretty woman, but she had vitality.

“Are you another one of them?” she said.

“Yes. I thought you left Harold.”

“So did I. But I decided to come back.”

“I’m glad you did. He needs your support.”

“Yeah.”

Her voice softened. “What’s going to happen to Harold? Are they going to lock him up and throw the key away?”

“Not if I can help it.”

“Are you with the FBI?”

“I’m more of a free lance.”

“I was wondering. They came this morning and took the car away. No Harold. Now no car. Next they’ll be taking the house from over my head. All on account of that lousy brother of his. It isn’t fair.”

“It’ll be straightened out. I’ll tell you the same thing I told Harold. His best chance of getting free and clear is to tell the truth.”

“The truth is, he let his brother take advantage of him. He always has. Mike is still–” She clapped her hand to her mouth and looked at me over it with alarm in her brown eyes.

“What is Mike still doing, Mrs. Harley?”

She glanced up and down the dingy street. A few young children were playing in the yards, with their mothers watching them. Lila plucked at my sleeve.

“Come inside, will you? Maybe we can make some kind of a deal.”

The front door opened directly into the living room. I stepped over a vacuum-cleaner hose just inside the door.

“I’ve been cleaning the house,” she said. “I had to do something and that was all I could think of.”

“I hope Harold will be coming home to appreciate it soon.”

“Yeah. It would help him, wouldn’t it, if I helped you to nail his brother?”

“It certainly would.”

“Would you let him go if you got Mike in his place?”

“I can’t promise that. I think it would probably happen.”

“Why can’t you promise?”

“I’m just a local investigator. But Mike is the one we really want. Do you know where he is, Mrs. Harley?”

For a long moment she stood perfectly still, her face as unchanging as one of her photographs hanging on the wall. Then she nodded slightly.

“I know where he was at three A.M. this morning.”

She jabbed a thumb toward the telephone. “He called here from Las Vegas at three A.M. He wanted Harold. I told him I didn’t know where Harold was – he was gone when I came home last night.”

“You’re sure it was Mike who called?”

“It couldn’t have been anybody else. I know his voice. And it isn’t the first time he called here, whining and wheedling for some of our hard-earned money.”

“He wanted money?”

“That’s right. I was to wire him five hundred dollars to the Western Union office in Las Vegas.”

“But he was carrying over twenty thousand.”

Her face closed, and became impassive. “I wouldn’t know about that. All I know is what he said. He needed money bad, and I was to wire him five hundred, which he would pay back double in twenty-four hours. I told him I’d see him in the hot place first. He was gambling.”

“It sounds like it, doesn’t it?”

“He’s a crazy gambler,” she said. “I hate a gambler.”

I called the Waiters Agency in Reno. Arnie’s wife and partner Phyllis told me that Arnie had taken an early plane to Vegas. Harold Harley’s two-tone Plymouth had been spotted at a motel on the Vegas Strip.

Not more than two hours later, after a plane ride of my own, I was sitting in a room of the motel talking with Arnie and the Plymouth’s new owner. He was a man named Fletcher who said he was from Phoenix, Arizona, although his accent sounded more like Texas. He was dressed up in a western dude costume, with high-heeled boots, a matching belt with a fancy silver buckle, and an amethyst instead of a tie. His Stetson lay on one of the twin beds, some women’s clothes on the other. The woman was in the bathroom taking a bath, Arnie told me, and I never did see her.

Mr. Fletcher was large and self-assured and very rough-looking. His face had been chopped rather carelessly from granite, then put out to weather for fifty or fifty-five years.

“I didn’t want to buy his heap,” he said. “I have a new Cadillac in Phoenix, you can check that. He didn’t even have a pink slip for it. I paid him five hundred for the heap because he was broke, desperate to stay in the game.”

“What game was that?” I asked him.

“Poker.”

“It was a floating game,” Arnie said, “in one of the big hotels. Mr. Fletcher refuses to name the hotel, or the other players. It went on all day yesterday and most of last night. There’s no telling how much Harley lost, but he lost everything he had.”

“Over twenty thousand, probably. Was the game rigged?”

Fletcher turned his head and looked at me the way a statue looks at a man. “It was an honest game, friend. It had to be. I was the big winner.”

“I wasn’t questioning your honesty.”

“No sir. Some of the finest people in Phoenix visit the little woman and I in our residence and we visit them in their residences. Honest Jack Fletcher, they call me.”

There was a silence in which the three of us sat and listened to the air-conditioner. I said: “That’s fine, Mr. Fletcher. How much did you win?”

“That’s between I and the tax collector, friend. I won a bundle. Which is why I gave him five hundred for his heap. I have no use for the heap. You can take it away.”

He lifted his arm in an imperial gesture.

“We’ll be doing just that,” Arnie said.

“You’re welcome to it. Anything I can do to cooperate.”

“You can answer a few more questions, Mr. Fletcher.”

I got out my picture of Tom. “Did you see this boy with Harley at any time?”

He examined the picture as if it was a card he had drawn, then passed it back to me. “I did not.”

“Hear any mention of him?”

“I never did. Harley came and went by himself and he didn’t talk. You could see he didn’t belong in a high-stakes game, but he had the money, and he wanted to lose it.”

“He wanted to lose it?” Arnie said.

“That’s right, the same way I wanted to win. He’s a born loser, I’m a born winner.”

Fletcher got up and strutted back and forth across the room. He lit a Brazilian cigar, not offering any around. As fast as he blew it out, the smoke disappeared in the draft from the air conditioner.

“What time did the game break up this morning?” I said.

“Around three, when I took my last big pot.” His mouth savored the recollection. “I was willing to stay, but the other people weren’t. Harley wanted to stay, naturally, but he didn’t have the money to back it up. He isn’t much of a poker player, frankly.”

“Did he give you any trouble?”

“No sir. The gentleman who runs the game discourages that sort of thing. No trouble. Harley did put the bite on me at the end. I gave him a hundred dollars ding money to get home.”

“Home where?”

“He said he came from Idaho.”

I took a taxi back to the airport and made a reservation on a plane that stopped in Pocatello. Before sundown I was driving a rented car out of Pocatello along Rural Route Seven, where the elder Harleys lived.