The Far Side of the Dollar

Chapter 24

I KISSED SUSANNA goodbye and drove down Wilshire through Westwood. I wanted to be at the Santa Monica bus station at nine, just in case Tom showed up, but there was still time for another crack at Ben Daly. I turned down San Vicente toward the coastal highway.

The sun was half down on the horizon, bleeding color into the sea and the sky. Even the front of the Barcelona Hotel was touched with factitious Mediterranean pink. The crowd of onlookers in the driveway had changed and dwindled. There were still a few waiting for something more interesting than their lives to happen.

It was a warm night, and most of them were in beach costume. One man was dressed formally in a dark gray business suit and dark gray felt hat. He looked familiar.

I pulled up the drive on impulse and got out. The man in the dark gray suit was Harold Harley. He was wearing a black tie, which Lila had doubtless chosen for him, and a woebegone expression.

It deepened when he saw me. “Mr. Archer?”

“You can’t have forgotten me, Harold.”

“No. It’s just that everything looks different, even people’s faces. Or that hotel there. It’s just a caved-in old dump, and I used to think it was a pretty ritzy place. Even the sky looks different.”

He raised his eyes to the red-stretched sky. “It looks hand-tinted, phony, like there was nothing behind it.”

The little man talked like an artist. He might have become one, I thought, with a different childhood.

“I didn’t realize you were so fond of your brother.”

“Neither did I. But it isn’t just that. I hate California. Nothing really good ever happened to me in California. Or Mike either.”

He gestured vaguely toward the cluster of official cars. “I wisht I was back in Idaho.”

I drew him away from the little group of onlookers, from the women in slacks and halters which their flesh overflowed, the younger girls with haystacks of hair slipping down their foreheads into their blue-shadowed eyes, the tanned alert looking boys with bleached heads and bleached futures. We stood under a magnolia tree that needed water.

“What happened to your brother started in Idaho, Harold.”

And also what happened to you, or failed to happen.

“You think I don’t know that? The old man always said Mike would die on the gallows. Anyway, he cheated the gallows.”

“I talked to your father yesterday.”

Harold started violently, and glanced behind him. “Is he in town?”

“I was in Pocatello yesterday.”

He looked both relieved and anxious. “How is he?”

“Much the same, I gather. You didn’t tell me he was one step ahead of the butterfly nets.”

“You didn’t ask me. Anyway, he isn’t like that all the time.”

“But he had to be committed more than once.”

“Yeah.”

He hung his head. In the final glare of day I could see the old closet dust in the groove of his hat, and the new sweat staining the hatband.

“It’s nothing to blame yourself for,” I said. “It explains a lot about Mike.”

“I know. The old man was a terror when Mike was a kid. Maw finally had him committed for what he did to Mike and her. Mike left home and never came back, and who could blame him?”

“But you stayed.”

“For a while. I had a trick of pretending I was some place else, like here in California. I finally came out here and went to photography school.”

I returned to the question that interested me. It was really a series of questions about the interlinked lives that brought Mike Harley and Carol Brown from their beginnings in Idaho to their ends in California. Their beginnings and ends had become clear enough. The middle still puzzled me, as well as the ultimate end that lay ahead in darkness.

“I talked to Carol’s parents, too,” I said. “Carol was there earlier in the summer, and she left a suitcase in her room. A letter in it explained to me why you blamed yourself for the Hillman extortion.”

“You saw my letter, eh? I should never have written a letter like that to Mike. I should have known better.”

He was hanging his head again.

“It’s hard to see ahead and figure what the little things we do will lead to. And you weren’t intending to suggest anything wrong.”

“Gosh, no.”

“Anyway, your letter helped me. It led me back here to Otto Sipe, and I hope eventually to the Hillman boy. The boy was holed up here with Sipe from Monday morning till Wednesday night, last night.”

“No kidding.”

“How well did you know Otto Sipe?”

Harold winced away from the question. If he could, he would have disappeared entirely, leaving his dark business suit and black tie and dusty hat suspended between the crisp brown grass and the dry leaves of the magnolia. He said in a voice that didn’t want to be heard: “He was Mike’s friend. I got to know him that way. He trained Mike for a boxing career.”

“What kind of a career did he train you for, Harold?”

“Me?”

“You. Didn’t Sipe get you the job as hotel photographer here?”

“On account of – I was Mike’s brother.”

“I’m sure that had something to do with it. But didn’t Sipe want you to help him with his sideline?”

“What sideline was that?”

“Blackmail.”

He shook his head so vehemently that his hat almost fell off. “I never had any part of the rake-off, honest. He paid me standard rates to take those pictures, a measly buck a throw, and if I didn’t do it I’d lose my job. I quit anyway, as soon as I had the chance. It was a dirty business.”

He peered up the driveway at the bland decaying face of the hotel. It was stark white now in the twilight. “I never took any benefit from it. I never even knew who the people were.”

“Not even once?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Didn’t you take a picture of Captain Hillman and his girl?”

His face was pale and wet. “I don’t know. I never knew their names.”

“Last spring at Newport you recognized Hillman.”

“Sure, he was the exec of Mike’s ship. I met him when I went aboard that time.”

“And no other time?”

“No sir.”

“When were you and Mike arrested? In the spring of 1945?”

He nodded. “The fifth of March. I’m not likely to forget it. It was the only time I ever got arrested. After they let me go I never came back here. Until now.”

He looked around at the place as if it had betrayed him a second time.

“If you’re telling the truth about the date, you didn’t take the picture I’m interested in. It was taken in April.”

“I’m not lying. By that time Otto Sipe had another boy.”

“What gave him so much power around the hotel?”

“I think he had something on the management. He hushed up something for them, long ago, something about a movie star who stayed here.”

“Was Mike staying here at the time he was picked up?”

“Yeah. I let him and Carol use my room, the one that went with the job. I slept in the employees’ dormitory. I think Otto Sipe let Carol stay on in the room for a while after me and Mike were arrested.”

“Was it the room next door to his, at the end of the corridor?”

“Yeah.”

“Did it have a brass bed in it?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“I was just wondering. They haven’t changed the furnishings since the war. That interconnecting bathroom would have been handy for Sipe, if he liked Carol.”

He shook his head. “Not him. He had no use for women. And Carol had no use for him. She got out of there as soon as she could make other arrangements. She went to live with a woman friend in Burbank.”

“Susanna.”

Harold blinked. “Yeah. That was her name, Susanna. I never met her, but she must have been a nice person.”

“What kind of a girl was Carol?”

“Carol? She was a beauty. When a girl has her looks, you don’t think much about going deeper. I mean, there she was. I always thought she was an innocent young girl. But Lila says you could fill a book with what I don’t know about women.”

I looked at my watch. It was past eight, and Harold had probably taken me as far as he could. Partly to make sure of this, I asked him to come across the highway and see his old acquaintance, Ben Daly. He didn’t hang back.

Daly scowled at us from the doorway of his lighted office. Then he recognized Harold, and his brow cleared. He came out and shook hands with him, disregarding me.

“Long time no see, Har.”

“You can say that again.”

They talked to each other across a distance of years, with some warmth and without embarrassment. There was no sign of guilty involvement between them. It didn’t follow necessarily, but I pretty well gave up on the idea that either of them was involved in any way with the recent crimes.

I broke in on their conversation: “Will you give me one minute, Ben? You may be able to help me solve that murder.”

“How? By killing somebody else?”

“By making another identification, if you can.”

I brought out Dick Leandro’s picture and forced it into his hand. “Have you ever seen this man?”

He studied the picture for a minute. His hand was unsteady. “I may have. I’m not sure.”

“When?”

“Last night. He may be the one who came to the hotel last night.”

“The one with the girl, in the new blue Chevvy?”

“Yeah. He could be the one. But I wouldn’t want to swear to it in court.”