The Far Side of the Dollar

Chapter 19

TRAFFIC WAS SPARSE on the coastal highway. Occasional night-crawling trucks went by, blazing with red and yellow lights. This stretch of highway was an ugly oil-stained place, fouled by petroleum fumes and rubbed barren by tires. Even the sea below it had a used-dishwater odor.

Ben Daly’s service station was dark, except for an inside bulb left on to discourage burglars. I left my car in his lot, beside an outside telephone booth, and crossed the highway to the Barcelona Hotel.

It was as dead as Nineveh. In the gardens behind the main building a mockingbird tried a few throbbing notes, like a tiny heart of sound attempting to beat, and then subsided. The intermittent mechanical movement of the highway was the only life in the inert black night.

I went up to the front door where the bankruptcy notice was posted and knocked on the glass with my flashlight. I knocked repeatedly, and got no answer. I was about to punch out a pane of glass and let myself in. Then I noticed that the door was unlocked. It opened under my hand.

I entered the lobby, jostling a couple of ghosts. They were Susanna, twenty years old, and a man without a face. I told them to get the hell out of my way.

I went down the corridor where Mr. Sipe had first appeared with his light, past the closed, numbered doors, to a door at the end which was standing slightly ajar. I could hear breathing inside the dark room, the heavy sighing breathing of a man in sleep or stupor. The odor of whisky was strong.

I reached inside the door and found the light switch with my right hand. I turned it on and shifted my hand to my gun butt. There was no need. Sipe was lying on the bed, fully clothed, with his ugly nostrils glaring and his loose mouth sighing at the ceiling. He was alone.

There was hardly space for anyone else. The room had never been large, and it was jammed with stuff which looked as if it had been accumulating for decades. Cartons and packing cases, piles of rugs, magazines and newspapers, suitcases and footlockers, were heaped at the back of the room almost to the ceiling. On the visible parts of the walls were pictures of young men in boxing stance, interspersed with a few girlie pictures.

Empty whisky bottles were ranged along the wall beside the door. A half-full bottle stood by the bed where Sipe was lying. I turned the key that was in the lock of the door and took a closer look at the sleeping man.

He wasn’t just sleeping. He was out, far out and possibly far gone. If I had put a match to his lips, his breath would have ignited like an alcohol burner. Even the front of his shirt seemed to be saturated with whisky, as though he’d poured it over himself in one last wild libation before he passed out.

His gun was stuck in the greasy waistband of his trousers. I transferred it to my jacket pocket before I tried to rouse him. He wouldn’t wake up. I shook him. He was inert as a side of beef, and his big head rolled loosely on the pillow. I slapped his pitted red cheeks. He didn’t even groan.

I went into the adjoining bathroom – it was also a kind of kitchen fitted out with an electric plate and a percolator that smelled of burned coffee, and filled the percolator with cold water from the bathtub faucet. This I poured over Sipe’s head and face, being careful not to drown him. He didn’t wake up.

I was getting a little worried, not so much about Sipe as about the possibility that he might never be able to give me his story. There was no way of telling how many of the bottles in the room had been emptied recently. I felt his pulse: laboriously slow. I lifted one of his eyelids. It was like looking down into a red oyster.

I had noticed that the bathroom was one of those with two doors, serving two rooms, that you find in older hotels. I went through it into the adjoining bedroom and shone my light around. It was a room similar in shape and size to the other, but almost bare. A brass double bed with a single blanket covering the mattress was just about the only furniture. The blanket lay in the tumbled folds that a man, or a boy, leaves behind when he gets up.

Hung over the head of the bed, like a limp truncated shadow of a boy, was a black sweater. It was a knitted sweater, and it had a raveled sleeve. Where the yarn was snarled and broken I could see traces of light-colored grease, the kind they use on the locks of automobile trunks. In the wastebasket I found several cardboard baskets containing the remains of hamburgers and french frieds.

My heart was beating in my ears. The sweater was pretty good physical evidence that Stella had not been conned. Tom was alive.

I found Sipe’s keys and locked him in his room and went through every other room in the building. There were nearly a hundred guest and service rooms, and it took a long time. I felt like an archaeologist exploring the interior of a pyramid. The Barcelona’s palmy days seemed that long ago.

All I got for my efforts was a noseful of dust. If Tom was in the building, he was hiding. I had a feeling that he wasn’t there, that he had left the Barcelona for good. Anybody would if he had the chance.

I went back across the highway to Daly’s station. My flashlight found a notice pasted to the lower right-hand corner of the front door. “In case of emergency call owner,” with Daly’s home number. I called it from the outside booth, and after a while got an answer: “Daly here.”

“Lew Archer. I’m the detective who was looking for Harold Harley.”

“This is a heck of a time to be looking for anybody.”

“I found Harley, thanks to you. Now I need your help in some more important business.”

“What’s the business?”

“I’ll tell you when you get here. I’m at your station.”

Daly had the habit of serviceability. “Okay. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

I waited for him in my car, trying to put the case together in my mind. It was fairly clear that Sipe and Mike Harley had been working together, and had used the Barcelona as a hideout. It didn’t look as if Tom had been a prisoner; more likely a willing guest, as Harley had said from the start. Even with Laguna Perdida School in the background, it was hard to figure out why a boy would do this to his parents and himself.

Daly came off the highway with a flourish and parked his pickup beside me. He got out and slammed the door, which had his name on it. He gave me a frowzy sardonic pre-dawn look.

“What’s on your mind, Mr. Archer?”

“Get in. I’ll show you a picture.”

He climbed in beside me. I turned on the dome light and got out Tom’s photograph. Every time I looked at it it had changed, gathering ambiguities on the mouth and in the eyes.

I put it in Daly’s oil-grained hands. “Have you seen him?”

“Yeah. I have. I saw him two or three times over the last couple of days. He made some telephone calls from the booth there. He made one yesterday afternoon.”

“What time?”

“I didn’t notice, I was busy. It was along toward the end of the afternoon. Then I saw him again last night waiting for the bus.”

He pointed down the road toward Santa Monica. “The bus stops at the intersection if you flag it down. Otherwise it don’t.”

“Which bus is that?”

“Any of the intercity buses, expecting the express ones.”

“Did you see him get on a bus?”

“No. I was getting ready to close up. Next time I looked he was gone.”

“What time was this?”

“Around eight-thirty last night.”

“What was he wearing?”

“White shirt, dark slacks.”

“What made you interested enough to watch him?”

Daly fidgeted. “I dunno. I didn’t watch him exactly. I saw him come out of the grounds of the Barcelona and I wondered what he was doing there, naturally. I’d hate to see such a nice-looking boy mixed up with a man like Sipe.”

He glanced at the photograph and handed it back to me, as if to relieve himself of the responsibility of explaining Tom.

“What’s the matter with Sipe?”

“What isn’t? I’ve got boys of my own, and I hate to see a man like Sipe teaching the boys to drink and other things. He ought to be in jail, if you want my opinion.”

“I agree. Let’s put him there.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I’m serious, Ben. Right now Sipe is in his hotel room, passed out. He probably won’t wake up for a long time. Just in case he does, will you stay here and watch for him to come out?”

“What do I do if he comes out?”

“Call the police and tell them to arrest him.”

“I can’t do that,” he said uneasily. “I know he’s a bad actor, but I got nothing definite to go on.”

“I have. If you’re forced to call the police, tell them Sipe is wanted in Pacific Point on suspicion of kidnapping. But don’t call them unless you have to. Sipe is my best witness, and once he’s arrested I’ll never see him again.”

“Where are you going?”

“To see if I can trace the boy.”

His eyes brightened. “Is he the one that’s been in all the papers? What’s his name? Hillman?”

“He’s the one.”

“I should have recognized him. I dunno, I don’t pay too much attention to people’s faces. But I can tell you what kind of a car they drive.”

“Does Sipe have a car?”

“Yeah. It’s a ’53 Ford with a cracked engine. I put some goop in it for him, but it’s due to die any day.”

Before I left, I asked Daly if he had seen anyone else around the hotel. He had, and he remembered. Mike Harley had been there Monday morning, driving the car with the Idaho license. I guessed that Tom had been riding in the trunk.

“And just last night,” he said, “there was this other young fellow driving a brand-new Chevvy. I think he had a girl with him, or maybe a smaller fellow. I was just closed up, and my bright lights were off.”

“Did you get a good look at the driver?”

“Not so good, no. I think he was dark-haired, a nice-looking boy. What he was doing with that crumb-bum–” Shaking his head some more, Ben started to get out of my car. He froze in mid-action: “Come to think of it, what’s the Hillman boy been doing walking around? I thought he was a prisoner and everybody in Southern California was looking for him.”

“We are.”

It took me a couple of hours, with the help of several bus company employees, to sort out the driver who had picked Tom up last night. His name was Albertson and he lived far out on La Cienaga in an apartment over a bakery. The sweet yeasty smell of freshly made bread permeated his small front room.

It was still very early in the morning. Albertson had pulled on trousers over his pajamas. He was a square-shouldered man of about forty, with alert eyes. He nodded briskly over the picture: “Yessir. I remember him. He got on my bus at the Barcelona intersection and bought a ticket into Santa Monica. He didn’t get off at Santa Monica, though.”

“Why not?”

He rubbed his heavily bearded chin. The sound rasped on my nerves. “Would he be wanted for something?” Albertson said.

“He would.”

“That’s what I thought at the time. He started to get off and then he saw somebody inside the station and the kid went back to his seat. I got off for a rest stop and it turned out there was a cop inside. When I came back the boy was still on the bus. I told him this was as far as his fare would take him. So he asked me to sell him a ticket to LA I was all set to go and I didn’t make an issue. If the kid was in trouble, it wasn’t up to me to turn him in. I’ve been in trouble myself. Did I do wrong?”

“You’ll find out on Judgment Day.”

He smiled. “That’s a long time to wait. What’s the pitch on the kid?”

“Read it in the papers, Mr. Albertson. Did he ride all the way downtown?”

“Yeah. I’m sure he did. He was one of the last ones to get off the bus.”

I went downtown and did some bird-dogging in and around the bus station. Nobody remembered seeing the boy. Of course the wrong people were on duty at this time in the morning. I’d stand a better chance if I tried again in the evening. And it was time I got back to Otto Sipe.

Ben Daly said he hadn’t come out of the hotel. But when we went to Sipe’s room the door was standing open and he was gone. Before he left he had finished the bottle of whisky by his bed.

“He must have had a master key, Ben. Is there any way out of here except the front?”

“No sir. He has to be on the grounds some place.”

We went around to the back of the sprawling building, past a dry swimming pool with a drift of brown leaves in the deep end. Under the raw bluff which rose a couple of hundred feet behind the hotel were the employees’ dormitories, garages, and other outbuildings. The two rear wings of the hotel contained a formal garden whose clipped shrubs and box hedges were growing back into natural shapes. Swaying on the topmost spray of a blue plumbago bush, a mockingbird was scolding like a jay.

I stood still and made a silencing gesture to Daly. Someone was digging on the far side of the bush. I could see some of his movements and hear the scrape of the spade, the thump of earth. I took out the gun and showed myself.

Otto Sipe looked up from his work. He was standing in a shallow hole about five feet long and two feet wide. There was dirt on his clothes. His face was muddy with sweat.

In the grass beside the hole a man in a gray jacket was lying on his back. The striped handle of a knife protruded from his chest. The man looked like Mike Harley, and he lay as if the knife had nailed him permanently to the earth.

“What are you doing, Otto?”

“Planting petunias.”

He bared his teeth in a doggish grin. The man seemed to be in that detached state of drunkenness where everything appears surreal or funny.

“Planting dead men, you mean.”

He turned and looked at Harley’s body as if it had just fallen from the sky. “Did he come with you?”

“You know who he is. You and Mike have been buddies ever since he left Pocatello with you in the early forties.”

“All right, I got a right to give a buddy a decent burial. You just can’t leave them lying around in the open for the vultures.”

“The only vultures I see around here are human ones. Did you kill him?”

“Naw. Why would I kill my buddy?”

“Who did?”

Leaning on his spade, he gave me a queer cunning look.

“Where’s Tom Hillman, Otto?”

“I’m gonna save my talk for when it counts.”

I turned to Ben Daly. “Can you handle a gun?”

“Hell no, I was only at Guadal.”

“Hold this on him.”

I handed him my revolver and went to look at Harley. His face when I touched it was cold as the night had been. This and the advanced coagulation of the blood that stained his shirt front told me he had been dead for many hours, probably all night.

I didn’t try to pull the knife out of his ribs. I examined it closely without touching it. The handle was padded with rubber, striped black and white, and molded to fit the hand. It looked new and fairly expensive.

The knife was the only thing of any value that had attached itself to Mike Harley. I went through his pockets and found the stub of a Las Vegas to Los Angeles plane ticket issued the day before, and three dollars and forty-two cents.

Ben Daly let out a yell. Several things happened at once. At the edge of my vision metal flashed and the mockingbird flew up out of the bush. The gun went off. A gash opened in the side of Daly’s head where Otto Sipe had hit him with the spade. Otto Sipe’s face became contorted. He clutched at his abdomen and fell forward, with the lower part of his body in the grave.

Ben Daly said: “I didn’t mean to shoot him. The gun went off when he swung the spade at me. After the war I never wanted to shoot anything.”

The gash in the side of his head was beginning to bleed. I tied my handkerchief around it and told him to go and call the police and an ambulance. He ran. He was surprisingly light on his feet for a man of middle age.

I was feeling surprisingly heavy on mine. I went to Sipe and turned him onto his back and opened his clothes. The wound in his belly was just below the umbilicus. It wasn’t bleeding much, externally, but he must have been bleeding inside. The life was draining visibly from his face.

It was Archer I mourned for. It had been a hard three days. All I had to show for them was a dead man and a man who was probably dying. The fact that the bullet in Sipe had come from my gun made it worse.

Compunction didn’t prevent me from going through Sipe’s pockets. His wallet was fat with bills, all of them twenties. But his share of the Hillman payoff wasn’t going to do him any good. He was dead before the ambulance came shrieking down the highway.