The Far Side of the Dollar

Chapter 20

A LOT OF talking was done, some on the scene and some in the sheriff’s office. With my support, and a phone call from Lieutenant Bastian, and the fairly nasty cut in the side of his head, Ben was able to convince the sheriff’s and the DA’s men that he had committed justifiable homicide. But they weren’t happy about it. Neither was I. I had let him kill my witness.

There was still another witness, if she would talk. By the middle of the morning I was back at the door of Susanna Drew’s apartment. Stella said through the door: “Who is it, please?”

“Lew Archer.”

She let me in. The girl had bluish patches under her eyes, as if their color had run. There was hardly any other color in her face.

“You look scared,” I said. “Has anything happened?”

“No. It’s one of the things that scares me. And I have to call my parents and I don’t want to. They’ll make me go home.”

“You have to go home.”

“No.”

“Yes. Think of them for a minute. You’re putting them through a bad time for no good reason.”

“But I do have a good reason. I want to try and meet Tommy again tonight. He said if he didn’t make it last night he’d be at the bus station tonight.”

“What time?”

“The same time. Nine o’clock.”

“I’ll meet him for you.”

She didn’t argue, but her look was evasive.

“Where’s Miss Drew, Stella?”

“She went out for breakfast. I was still in bed, and she left me a note. She said she’d be back soon, but she’s been gone for at least two hours.”

She clenched her fists and rapped her knuckles together in front of her. “I’m worried.”

“About Susanna Drew?”

“About everything. About me. Things keep getting worse. I keep expecting it to end, but it keeps getting worse. I’m changing, too. There’s hardly anybody I like any more.”

“The thing will end, Stella, and you’ll change back.”

“Will I? It doesn’t feel like a reversible change. I don’t see how Tommy and I are ever going to be happy.”

“Survival is the main thing.”

It was a hard saying to offer a young girl. “Happiness come in fits and snatches. I’m having more of it as I get older. The teens were my worst time.”

“Really?”

Her brow puckered. “Do you mind if I ask you a personal question, Mr. Archer?”

“Go ahead.”

“Are you interested in Miss Drew? You know what I mean. Seriously.”

“I think I am. Why?”

“I don’t know whether I should tell you this or not. She went out for breakfast with another man.”

“That’s legitimate.”

“I don’t know. I didn’t actually see him but I heard his voice and I’m very good on voices. I think it was a married man.”

“How can you tell that from a man’s voice?”

“It was Tommy’s father,” she said. “Mr. Hillman.”

I sat down. For a minute I couldn’t think of anything to say. The African masks on the sunlit wall seemed to be making faces at me.

Stella approached me with an anxious expression. “Shouldn’t I have told you? Ordinarily I’m not a tattletale. I feel like a spy in her house.”

“You should have told me. But don’t tell anyone else, please.”

“I won’t.”

Having passed the information on to me, she seemed relieved.

“Did the two of them seem friendly, Stella?”

“Not exactly. I didn’t see them together. I stayed in my room because I didn’t want him to see me. She wasn’t glad to have him come here, I could tell. But they did sound kind of intimate.”

“Just what do you mean by ‘intimate’?”

She thought about her answer. “It was something about the way they talked, as if they were used to talking back and forth. There wasn’t any politeness or formality.”

“What did they say to each other?”

“Do you want me to try and tell you word for word?”

“Exactly, from the moment he came to the door.”

“I didn’t hear all of it. Anyway, when he came in, she said: ‘I thought you had more discretion than this, Ralph.’ She called him Ralph. He said: ‘Don’t give me that. The situation is getting desperate.’ I don’t know what he meant by that.”

“What do you think he meant?”

“Tommy and all, but there may have been more to it. They didn’t say. He said: ‘I thought I could expect a little sympathy from you.’ She said she was all out of sympathy, and he said she was a hard woman and then he did something – I think he tried to kiss her – and she said: ‘Don’t do that!’ ”

“Did she sound angry?”

Stella assumed a listening attitude and looked at the high ceiling. “Not so very. Just not interested. He said: ‘You don’t seem to like me very much.’ She said that the question was a complicated one and she didn’t think now was the time to go into it, especially with somebody in the guest room, meaning me. He said: ‘Why didn’t you say so in the first place? Is it a man?’ After that they lowered their voices. I don’t know what she told him. They went out for breakfast in a few minutes.”

“You have a very good memory,” I said.

She nodded, without self-consciousness. “It helps me in school, but in other ways it isn’t so fabulous. I remember all the bad things along with the good things.”

“And the conversation you heard this morning was one of the bad things?”

“Yes, it was. It frightened me. I don’t know why.”

It frightened me, too, to learn that Hillman might have been the faceless man with Susanna when she was twenty. In different degrees I cared about them both. They were people with enough feeling to be hurt, and enough complexity to do wrong. Susanna I cared about in ways I hadn’t even begun to explore.

Now the case was taking hold of her skirt like the cogs of an automated machine that nobody knew how to stop. I have to admit that I wouldn’t have stopped it even if I knew how. Which is the peculiar hell of being a pro.

“Let’s see the note she left you.”

Stella fetched it from the kitchen, a penciled note scrawled on an interoffice memo form:

“Did you have anything to eat?” I said to Stella.

“I drank a glass of milk.”

“And a hamburger last night for dinner. No wonder you look pinched. Come on, I’ll take you out for breakfast. It’s the going thing.”

“All right. Thank you. But then what?”

“I drive you home.”

She turned and walked to the sliding glass doors that opened onto the patio, as far away in the room as she could get from me. A little wind was blowing, and I could hear it rustling in the fronds of a miniature palm. Stella turned back to me decisively, as if the wind and the sunlight had influenced her through the glass.

“I guess I have to go home. I can’t go on scaring my mother.”

“Good girl. Now call her and tell her you’re on your way.”

She considered my suggestion, standing in the sunlight with her head down, the white straight part of her hair bisecting her brown head. “I will if you won’t listen.”

“How will I know you’ve done it?”

“I never lied to you yet,” she said with feeling. “That’s because you don’t tell lies to me. Not even for my own good.”

She produced her first smile of the morning.

I think I produced mine. It had been a bad morning.

I immured myself in a large elaborate bathroom with fuzzy blue carpeting and did some washing, ritual and otherwise. I found a safety razor among the cosmetics and sleeping pills in the medicine cabinet, and used it to shave with. I was planning an important interview, a series of them if I could set them up.

Stella’s cheeks were flushed when I came out. “I called home. We better not stop for breakfast on the way.”

“Your mother’s pretty excited, is she?”

“Dad was the one I talked to. He blames you. I’m sorry.”

“It was my bad judgment,” I said. “I should have taken you home last night. But I had something else to do.”

Get a man killed.

“It was my bad judgment,” she said. “I was punishing them for lying about Tommy and me and the car.”

“I’m glad you know that. How upset is your father?”

“Very upset. He even said something about Laguna Perdida School. He didn’t really mean it, though.”

But a shadow crossed her face.

About an hour later, driving south with Stella toward El Rancho, I caught a distant glimpse of the school. The rising wind had blown away all trace of the overcast, but even in unobstructed sunlight its buildings had a desolate look about them. I found myself straining my eyes for the lonely blue heron. He wasn’t on the water or in the sky.

On impulse, I turned off the highway and took the access road to Laguna Perdida. My car passed over the treadle. The automatic gates rose.

Stella said in a tiny voice: “You’re not going to put me in here?”

“Of course not. I want to ask a certain person a question. I won’t be long.”

“They better not try to put me in here,” she said. “I’ll run away for good.”

“You’ve had more mature ideas.”

“What else can I do?” she said a little wildly.

“Stay inside the safety ropes, with your own kind of people. You’re much too young to step outside, and I don’t think your parents are so bad. They’re probably better than average.”

“You don’t know them.”

“I know you. You didn’t just happen.”

The old guard came out of his kiosk and limped up to my side of the car. “Dr. Sponti isn’t here just now.”

“How about Mrs. Mallow?”

“Yeah. You’ll find her down the line in East Hall.”

He pointed toward the building with the ungenerous windows.

Leaving Stella in the car, I knocked on the front door of East Hall. After what seemed a long time, Mrs. Mallow answered. She was wearing the same dark formal costume that she had been wearing on Monday, and the same rather informal smell of gin.

She smiled at me, at the same time flinching away from the daylight. “Mr. Archer, isn’t it?”

“How are you, Mrs. Mallow?”

“Don’t ever ask me that question in the morning. Or any other time, now that I come to think of it. I’m surviving.”

“Good.”

“But you didn’t come here to inquire after my health.”

“I’d like to have a few minutes with Fred Tyndal.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, “the boys are all in class.”

“It could be important.”

“You want to ask Fred some questions, is that it?”

“Just one, really. It wouldn’t have to take long.”

“And it won’t be anything disturbing?”

“I don’t think so.”

She left me in the lounge and went into Patch’s office to make a telephone call. I wandered around the big battered homeless room, imagining how it would feel to be a boy whose parents had left him here. Mrs. Mallow came back into the room: “Fred will be right over.”

While I was waiting, I listened to the story of her marriages, including the one that had lasted, her marriage to the bottle. Then Fred came in out of the sunlight, none of which adhered to him. He sort of loitered just inside the door, pulling at the hairs on his chin and waiting to be told what he had done wrong this time.

I got up and moved toward him, not too quickly. “Hello, Fred.”

“Hello.”

“You remember the talk we had the other day?”

“There’s nothing the matter with my memory.”

He added with his quick evanescent smile: “You’re Lew Archer the First. Did you find Tom yet?”

“Not yet. I think you can help me find him.”

He scuffed the doorframe with the side of his shoe. “I don’t see how.”

“By telling me everything you know. One thing I can promise – they won’t put him back in here.”

“What good will that do me?” he said forlornly.

I had no answer ready. After a moment the boy said, “What do you want me to tell you?”

“I think you were holding back a little the other day. I don’t blame you. You didn’t know me from Adam. You still don’t, but it’s three days later now, and Tom is still missing.”

His face reflected the seriousness of this. He couldn’t stand such seriousness for very long. He said with a touch of parody: “Okay, I’ll talk, I’ll spill everything.”

“I want to ask you this. When Tom broke out of here Saturday night, did he have any definite person or place in mind that he intended to go to?”

He ducked his head quickly in the affirmative. “Yeah, I think so.”

“Do you know where he was going?”

“Tom didn’t say. He did say something else, though, something about finding his true father.”

The boy’s voice broke through into feeling he couldn’t handle. He said: “Big deal.”

“What did he mean by that, Fred?”

“He said he was adopted.”

“Was he really?”

“I don’t know. A lot of the kids here want to think they’re adopted. My therapist calls it a typical Freudian family romance.”

“Do you think Tom was serious?”

“Sure he was.”

Once again the boy’s face reflected seriousness, and I caught a glimpse there of the maturity that he might reach yet. “He said he couldn’t know who he was until he knew for sure who his father was.”

He grinned wryly. “I’m trying to forget who my father is.”

“You can’t.”

“I can try.”

“Get interested in something else.”

“There isn’t anything else.”

“There will be.”

“When?” he said.

Mrs. Mallow interrupted us. “Have you found out what you need to know, Mr. Archer? Fred really should be going back to class now.”

I said to him: “Is there anything else you can tell me?”

“No, sir. Honestly. We didn’t talk much.”

The boy started out. He turned in the doorway suddenly, and spoke to me in a voice different from the one he had been using, a voice more deep and measured: “I wish you were my father.”

He turned away into the bleak sunlight.

Back in the car, I said to Stella: “Did Tom ever tell you that he was adopted?”

“Adopted? He can’t be.”

“Why not?”

“He can’t be, that’s all.”

The road curved around a reedy marsh where the red-winged blackbirds sounded like woodwinds tuning up, and violins. Stella added after a while: “For one thing, he looks like his father.”

“Adopted children often do. They’re picked to match the parents.”

“How awful. How commercial. Who told you he was adopted?”

“He told a friend at the school.”

“A girl?”

“A boy.”

“I’m sure he was making it up.”

“Did he often make things up?”

“Not often. But he did – he does have some funny ideas about some things. He told me just this summer that he was probably a changeling, you know? That they got him mixed up with some other baby in the hospital, and Mr. and Mrs. Hillman weren’t his real parents.”

She turned toward me, crouching on the seat with her legs under her. “Do you think that could be true?”

“It could be. Almost anything can happen.”

“But you don’t believe it.”

“I don’t know what I believe, Stella.”

“You’re an adult,” she said with a hint of mockery. “You’re supposed to know.”

I let it drop. We rode in silence to the gate of El Rancho. Stella said: “I wonder what my father is going to do to me.”

She hesitated. “I apologize for getting you into this.”

“It’s all right. You’ve been the best help I’ve had.”

Jay Carlson, whom I hadn’t met and wasn’t looking forward to meeting, was standing out in front of his house when we got there. He was a well-fed, youngish man with sensitive blue eyes resembling Stella’s. At the moment he looked sick with anger, gray and shuddering with it.

Rhea Carlson, her red hair flaring like a danger signal, came out of the house and rushed up to the car, with her husband trudging behind her. He acted like a man who disliked trouble and couldn’t handle it well. The woman spoke first: “What have you been doing with my daughter?”

“Protecting her as well as I could. She spent the night with a woman friend of mine. This morning I talked her into coming home.”

“I intend to check that story very carefully,” Carlson said. “What was the name of this alleged woman friend?”

“Susanna Drew.”

“Is he telling the truth, Stella?” She nodded.

“Can’t you talk?” he cried. “You’ve been gone all night and you won’t even speak to us.”

“Don’t get so excited, Daddy. He’s telling the truth. I’m sorry I went to Los Angeles but–”

He couldn’t wait for her to finish. “I’ve got a right to get excited, after what you’ve done. We didn’t even know if you were alive.”

Stella bowed her head. “I’m sorry, Daddy.”

“You’re a cruel, unfeeling girl,” her mother said. “And I’ll never be able to believe you again. Never.”

“You know better than that, Mrs. Carlson.”

Her husband turned on me fiercely. “You stay out of it.”

He probably wanted to hit me. In lieu of this, he grasped Stella by the shoulders and shook her. “Are you out of your mind, to do a thing like this?”

“Lay off her, Carlson.”

“She’s my daughter!”

“Treat her like one. Stella’s had a rough night–”

“She’s had a rough night, has she? What happened?”

“She’s been trying to grow up, under difficulties, and you’re not giving her much help.”

“What she needs is discipline. And I know where she can get it.”

“If you’re thinking of Laguna Perdida, your thinking is way out of line. Stella is one of the good ones, one of the best–”

“I’m not interested in your opinion. I suggest you get off my place before I call the police.”

I left them together, three well-intentioned people who couldn’t seem to stop hurting each other. Stella had the courage to lift her hand to me in farewell.