The Far Side of the Dollar

Chapter 25

THE SANTA MONICA bus station is on a side street off lower Wilshire. At a quarter to nine I left my car at the curb and went in. Stella, that incredible child, was there. She was sitting at the lunch counter at the rear in a position from which she could watch all the doors.

She saw me, of course, and swung around to hide her face in a cup of coffee. I sat beside her. She put down her cup with an impatient rap. The coffee in it looked cold, and had a grayish film on it.

She spoke without looking directly at me, like somebody in a spy movie. “Go away. You’ll frighten Tommy off”

“He doesn’t know me.”

“But I’m supposed to be alone. Besides, you look like a policeman or something.”

“Why is Tommy allergic to policemen?”

“You would be, too, if they locked you up the way they locked him up.”

“If you keep running away, they’ll be locking you up, Stella.”

“They’re not going to get the chance,” she said, with a sharp sideways glance at me. “My father took me to a psychiatrist today, to see if I needed to be sent to Laguna Perdida. I told her everything, just as I’ve told you. She said there was nothing the matter with me at all. So when my father went in to talk to her I walked out the front door and took a taxi to the bus station, and there was a bus just leaving.”

“I’m going to have to drive you home again.”

She said in a very young voice: “Don’t teenagers have any rights?”

“Yes, including the right to adult protection.”

“I won’t go without Tommy!”

Her voice rose and broke on his name. Half the people in the small station were looking at us. The woman behind the lunch counter came over to Stella.

“Is he bothering you, miss?”

She shook her head. “He’s a very good friend.”

This only deepened the woman’s suspicions, but it silenced her. I ordered a cup of coffee. When she went to draw it, I said to Stella: “I won’t go without Tommy, either. What did your psychiatrist friend think about him, by the way?”

“She didn’t tell me. Why?”

“I was just wondering.”

The waitress brought my coffee. I carried it to the far end of the counter and drank it slowly. It was eight minutes to nine. People were lining up at the loading door, which meant that a bus was expected.

I went out the front, and almost walked into Tommy. He had on slacks and a dirty white shirt. His face was a dirty white, except where a fuzz of beard showed.

“Excuse me, sir,” he said, and stepped around me.

I didn’t want to let him get inside, where taking him would create a public scene that would bring in the police. I needed a chance to talk to him before anyone else did. There wasn’t much use in trying to persuade him to come with me. He was lean and quick and could certainly outrun me.

These thoughts went through my head in the second before he reached the door of the station. I put both arms around his waist from behind, lifted him off his feet, and carried him wildly struggling to my car. I pushed him into the front seat and got in beside him. Other cars were going by in the road, but nobody stopped to ask me any questions. They never do any more.

Tom let out a single dry sob or whimper, high in his nose. He must have known that this was the end of running.

“My name is Lew Archer,” I said. “I’m a private detective employed by your father.”

“He isn’t my father.”

“An adoptive father is a father, too.”

“Not to me he isn’t. I don’t want any part of Captain Hillman,” he said with the cold distance of injured youth. “Or you either.”

I noticed a cut on the knuckle of his right hand. It had been bleeding. He put the knuckle in his mouth and sucked it, looking at me over it. It was hard to take him seriously at that moment. But he was a very serious young man.

“I’m not going back to my cruddy so-called parents.”

“You have nobody else.”

“I have myself.”

“You haven’t been handling yourself too well.”

“Another lecture.”

“I’m pointing out a fact. If you could look after yourself decently, you might make out a case for independence. But you’ve been rampaging around clobbering middle-aged doctors–”

“He tried to make me go home.”

“You’re going home. The alternative seems to be a life with bums and criminals.”

“You’re talking about my parents, my real parents.”

He spoke with conscious drama, but there was also a kind of bitter awe in his voice. “My mother wasn’t a bum and she wasn’t a criminal. She was– nice.”

“I didn’t mean her.”

“And my father wasn’t so bad, either,” he said without conviction.

“Who killed them, Tom?”

His face became blank and tight. It looked like a wooden mask used to fend off suffering.

“I don’t know anything about it,” he said in a monotone. “I didn’t know Carol was dead, even, till I saw the papers last night. I didn’t know Mike was dead till I saw the papers today. Next question.”

“Don’t be like that, Tom. I’m not a cop, and I’m not your enemy.”

“With the so-called parents I’ve got, who needs enemies? All my – all Captain Hillman ever wanted was a pet boy around the house, somebody to do tricks. I’m tired to doing tricks for him.”

“You should be tired, after this last trick. It was a honey of a trick.”

He gave me his first direct look, half in anger and half in fear. “I had a right to go with my real parents.”

“Maybe. We won’t argue about that. But you certainly had no right to help them extort money from your father.”

“He’s not my father.”

“I know that. Do you have to keep saying it?”

“Do you have to keep calling him my father?”

He was a difficult boy. I felt good, anyway. I had him.

“Okay,” I said. “We’ll call him Mr. X and we’ll call your mother Madam X and we’ll call you the Lost Dauphin of France.”

“That isn’t so funny.”

He was right. It wasn’t.

“Getting back to the twenty-five thousand dollars you helped to take them for, I suppose you know you’re an accomplice in a major felony.”

“I didn’t know about the money. They didn’t tell me. I don’t think Carol knew about it, either.”

“That’s hard to believe, Tom.”

“It’s true. Mike didn’t tell us. He just said he had a deal cooking.”

“If you didn’t know about the extortion, why did you ride away in the trunk of his car?”

“So I wouldn’t be seen. Mike said my dad–” he swallowed the word, with disgust “–he said that Captain Hillman had all the police looking for me, to put me back in Laguna–” He became aware of his present situation. He peered around furtively, scrambled under the wheel to the far door. I pulled him back into the middle of the seat and put an armlock on him.

“You’re staying with me, Tom, if I have to use handcuffs.”

“FUZZ!”

The jeering word came strangely from him, like a foreign word he was trying to make his own. It bothered me. Boys, like men, have to belong to something. Tom had felt betrayed by one world, the plush deceptive world of Ralph Hillman, with schools like Laguna Perdida on the underside of the weave. He had plunged blindly into another world, and now he had lost that. His mind must be desperate for a place to rest, I thought, and I wasn’t doing much of a job of providing one.

A bus came down the street. As it turned into the loading area, I caught a glimpse of passengers at the windows, travel-drugged and blare. California here we come, right back where we started from.

I relaxed my grip on Tom. “I couldn’t let you go,” I said, “even if I wanted to. You’re not stupid. Try for once to figure out how this looks to other people.”

“This?”

“The whole charade. Your running away from school – for which I certainly don’t blame you–”

“Thanks a lot.”

I disregarded his irony. “And the phony kidnapping and all the rest of it. An adopted son is just as important as a real one to his parents. Yours have been worried sick about you.”

“I bet.”

“Neither one of them gave a damn about the money, incidentally. It’s you they cared about, and care about.”

“There’s something missing,” he said.

“What?”

“The violin accompaniment.”

“You’re a hard boy to talk to, Tom.”

“My friends don’t think so.”

“What’s a friend? Somebody who lets you run wild?”

“Somebody who doesn’t want to throw me into the Black Hole of Calcutta, otherwise known as Laguna Perdida School.”

“I don’t.”

“You say you don’t. But you’re working for Captain Hillman, and he does.”

“Not any more.”

The boy shook his head. “I don’t believe you, and I don’t believe him. After a few things happen to you, you start to believe what people do, not what they say. People like the Hillmans would think that a person like Carol was a nothing, a nothing woman. But she wasn’t to me. She liked me. She treated me well. Even my real father never raised his hand to me. The only trouble we had was about the way he treated Carol.”

He had dropped his brittle sardonic front and was talking to me in a human voice. Stella chose this moment to come out of the loading area onto the sidewalk. Her faced was pinched with disappointment.

Tom caught sight of her almost as soon as I did. His eyes lit up as if she was an angel from some lost paradise. He leaned across me.

“Hey! Stell!”

She came running. I got out of the car and let her take my place beside the boy. They didn’t embrace or kiss. Perhaps their hands met briefly. I got in behind the wheel.

Stella was saying: “It feels as though you’ve been gone for ages.”

“It does to me, too.”

“You should have called me sooner.”

“I did.”

“I mean, right away.”

“I was afraid you’d– do what you did.” He jerked his chin in my direction.

“I didn’t, though. Not really. It was his idea. Anyway, you have to go home. We both do.”

“I have no home.”

“Neither have I, then. Mine’s just as bad as yours.”

“No, it isn’t.”

“Yes, it is. Anyway,” she said to clinch the argument, “you need a bath. I can smell you. And a shave.”

I glanced at his face. It had a pleased silly embarrassed expression.

The street was empty of traffic at the moment. I started the car and made a U-turn toward the south. Tom offered no objection.

Once on the freeway, in that anonymous world of rushing lights and darkness, he began to talk in his human voice to Stella.

Carol had phoned him, using his personal number, several weeks before. She wanted to arrange a meeting with him. That night, driving Ralph Hillman’s Cadillac, he picked her up at the view-point overlooking the sea near Dack’s Auto Court.

He parked in an orange grove that smelled of weddings and listened to the story of her life. Even though he’d often doubted that he belonged to the Hillmans, it was hard for him to believe that he was Carol’s son. But he was strongly drawn to her. The relationship was like an escape hatch in Captain Hillman’s tight little ship. He kept going back to Carol, and eventually he believed her. He even began to love her in a way.

“Why didn’t you tell me about her?” Stella said. “I would have liked to know her.”

“No, you wouldn’t.”

His voice was rough. “Anyway, I had to get to know her myself first. I had to get adjusted to the whole idea of my mother. And then I had to decide what to do. You see, she wanted to leave my father. He gave her a hard time, he always had. She said if she didn’t get away from him soon, she’d never be able to. She wasn’t good at standing up for herself, and she wanted my help. Besides, I think she knew he was up to something.”

“You mean the kidnapping and all?” she said.

“I think she knew it and she didn’t know it. You know how women are.”

“I know my mother,” she answered sagely.

They had forgotten me. I was the friendly chauffeur, good old graying Lew Archer, and we would go on driving like this forever through a night so dangerous that it had to feel secure. I remembered a kind of poem or parable that Susanna had quoted to me years before. A bird came in through a window at one end of a lighted hall, flew the length of the hall, and out through another window into darkness: that was the span of a human life. The headlights that rose in the distance and swooped by and fell away behind us reminded me of Susanna’s briefly lighted bird. I wished that she was with me.

Tom was telling Stella how he first met his father. Mike had been kept in the background the first week; he was supposed to be in Los Angeles looking for work. Finally, on the Saturday night, Tom met him at the auto court.

“That was the night you borrowed our car, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah. My fa– Ralph had me grounded, you know. Carol spilled some wine on the front seat of the car and he smelled it. He thought I was driving and drinking.”

“Did Carol drink much?”

“Quite a bit. She drank a lot that Saturday night. So did he. I had some wine, too.”

“You’re not old enough.”

“It was with dinner,” he said. “Carol cooked spaghetti. Spaghetti a la Pocatello, she called it. She sang some of the old songs for me, like ‘Sentimental journey’. It was kind of fun,” he said doubtfully.

“Is that why you didn’t come home?”

“No. I–” The word caught in his throat. “I–” His face, which I could see in the rear-view mirror, became contorted with effort. He couldn’t finish the sentence.

“Did you want to stay with them?” Stella said after a while.

“No. I don’t know.”

“How did you like your father?”

“He was all right, I guess, until he got drunk. We played some gin rummy and he didn’t win, so he broke up the game. He started to take it out on Carol. I almost had a fight with him. He said he used to be a boxer and I’d be crazy to try it, that his fists could kill.”

“It sounds like a terrible evening.”

“That part of it wasn’t so good.”

“What part of it was?”

“When she sang the old songs. And she told me about my grandfather in Pocatello.”

“Did that take all night?” she said a little tartly.

“I didn’t stay with them all night. I left around ten o’clock, when we almost had the fight. I–” The same word stuck in his throat again, as if it was involved with secret meanings that wouldn’t let it be spoken.

“What did you do?”

“I went and parked on the view-point where I picked her up the first time. I sat there until nearly two o’clock, watching the stars and listening, you know, to the sea. The sea and the highway. I was trying to figure out what I should do, where I belonged. I still haven’t got it figured out.”

He added, in a voice that was conscious of me: “Now I guess I don’t have any choice. They’ll put me back in the Black Hole of Calcutta.”

“Me too,” she said with a nervous giggle. “We can send each other secret notes. Tap out messages on the bars and stuff.”

“It isn’t funny, Stell. Everybody out there is crazy, even some of the staff. They get that way.”

“You’re changing the subject,” she said. “What did you do at two A.M.?”

“I went to see Sam Jackman when he got off work. I thought I could ask him what to do, but I found out that I couldn’t. I just couldn’t tell him that they were my parents. So I went out in the country, and drove around for a few hours. I didn’t want to go home, and I didn’t want to go back to the auto court.”

“So you turned the car over and tried to kill yourself.”

“I–” Silence set in again, and this time it lasted. He sat bolt upright, staring ahead, watching the headlights rise out of the darkness. After a time I noticed that Stella’s arm was across his shoulders. His face was streaked with tears.