The Far Side of the Dollar

Chapter 28

WE WENT INTO the sitting room, the waiting room. Though Tom was in the house the waiting seemed to go on, as if it had somehow coalesced with time. Elaine was in her place on the chesterfield. She had taken up her knitting, and her stainless-steel needles glinted along the edge of the red wool. She looked up brightly at her husband.

“Where’s Tom?” he said. “Is he still upstairs?”

“I heard him go down the back stairs. I imagine Mrs. Perez is feeding him in the kitchen. He seems to prefer the kitchen to the sitting room. I suppose that’s natural, considering his heredity.”

“We won’t go into the subject of that, eh?”

Hillman went into the bar alcove and made himself a very dark-looking highball. He remembered to offer me one, which I declined.

“What did that policeman want?” Elaine asked him.

“He had some stupid questions on his mind. I prefer not to go into them.”

“So you’ve been telling me for the past twenty-five years. You prefer not to go into things. Save the surface. Never mind the dry rot at the heart.”

“Could we dispense with the melodrama?”

“The word is tragedy, not melodrama. A tragedy has gone through this house and you don’t have the mind to grasp it. You live in a world of appearances, like a fool.”

“I know. I know.”

His voice was light, but he looked ready to throw his drink in her face. “I’m an ignorant engineer, and I never studied philosophy.”

Her needles went on clicking. “I could stand your ignorance, but I can’t stand your evasions any longer.”

He drank part of his drink, and waved his free hand loosely over his head. “Good heavens, Elaine, how much do I have to take from you? This isn’t the time or place for one of those.”

“There never is a time or place,” she said. “If there’s time, you change the clocks – this is known as crossing the International Ralph Line – and suddenly it’s six o’clock in the morning, in Tokyo. If there’s a place, you find an escape hatch. I see your wriggling legs and then you’re off and away, into the wild Ralph yonder. You never faced up to anything in your life.”

He winced under her bitter broken eloquence. “That isn’t true,” he said uneasily. “Archer and I have been really dredging tonight.”

“Dredging in the warm shallows of your nature? I thought you reserved that pastime for your women. Like Susanna Drew.”

Her name sent a pang through me. It was a nice name, innocent and bold and slightly absurd, and it didn’t deserve to be bandied about by these people. If the Hillmans had ever been innocent, their innocence had been frittered away in a marriage of pretenses. It struck me suddenly that Hillman’s affair with Susanna had also been one of pretenses. He had persuaded her to take care of Carol without any hint that he was the father of the child she was carrying.

“Good Lord,” he was saying now, “are we back on the Drew girl again after all these years?”

“Well, are we?” Elaine said.

Fortunately the telephone rang. Hillman went into the alcove to answer it, and turned to me with his hand clapped over the mouthpiece.

“It’s Bastian, for you. You can take the call in the pantry. I’m going to listen on this line.”

There wasn’t much use arguing. I crossed the music room and the dining room to the butler’s pantry and fumbled around in the dark for the telephone. I could hear Mrs. Perez in the kitchen, talking to Tom in musical sentences about her native province of Sinaloa. Bastian’s voice in the receiver sounded harsh and inhuman by comparison: “Archer?”

“I’m here.”

“Good. I checked the matter of Dick Leandro’s transportation, in fact I’ve just been talking to a girl friend of his. She’s a senior at the college, named Katie Ogilvie, and she owns a Chevrolet sedan, this year’s model, blue in color. She finally admitted she lent it to him last night. He put over a hundred miles on the odometer.”

“Are you sure she wasn’t with him? He had a girl with him, or another boy, Daly wasn’t quite sure.”

“It wasn’t Miss Ogilvie,” Bastian said. “She was peeved about the fact that he used her car to take another girl for a long ride.”

“How does she know it was a girl?”

“The lady dropped a lipstick in the front seat. A very nice white gold lipstick, fourteen carat. I don’t think,” he added dryly, “that Miss Ogilvie would have testified so readily if it wasn’t for that lipstick. Apparently Leandro impressed the need for secrecy on her.”

“Did he say why?”

“It had something to do with the Hillman kidnapping. That was all she knew. Well, do we pick up Leandro? You seem to be calling the shots.”

“He’s on his way out here. Maybe you better follow along.”

“You sound as if things are building up to a climax.”

“Yeah.”

I could see its outlines. They burned on my eyeballs like the lights of Dack’s Auto Court. I sat in the dark after Bastian hung up, and tried to blink them away. But they spread out into the darkness around me and became integrated with the actual world.

Sinaloa, Mrs. Perez was saying or kind of singing to Tom in the kitchen, Sinaloa was a land of many rivers. There were eleven rivers in all, and she and her family lived so close to one of them that her brothers would put on their bathing suits and run down for a swim every day. Her father used to go down to the river on Sunday and catch fish with a net and distribute them to the neighbors. All the neighbors had fish for Sunday lunch.

Tom said it sounded like fun.

Ah yes, it was like Paradise, she said, and her father was a highly regarded man in their barrio. Of course it was hot in summer, that was the chief drawback, a hundred and twenty degrees in the shade sometimes. Then big black clouds would pile up along the Sierra Madre Occidental, and it would rain so hard, inches in just two hours. Then it would be sunny again. Sunny, sunny, sunny! That was how life went in Sinaloa.

Tom wanted to know if her father was still alive. She replied with joy that her father lived on, past eighty now, in good health. Perez was visiting him on his present trip to Mexico.

“I’d like to visit your father.”

“Maybe you will some day.”

I opened the door. Tom was at the kitchen table, eating the last of his soup. Mrs. Perez was leaning over him with a smiling maternal mouth and faraway eyes. She looked distrustfully at me. I was an alien in their land of Sinaloa.

“What do you want?”

“A word with Tom. I’ll have to ask you to leave for a bit.”

She stiffened.

“On second thought, there won’t be any more secrets in this house. You might as well stay, Mrs. Perez.”

“Thank you.”

She picked up the soup bowl and walked switching to the sink, where she turned the hot water full on. Tom regarded me across the table with the infinite boredom of the young. He was very clean and pale.

“I hate to drag you back over the details,” I said, “but you’re the only one who can answer some of these questions.”

“It’s okay.”

“I’m not clear about yesterday, especially last night. Were you still at the Barcelona Hotel when Mike Harley got back from Vegas?”

“Yes. He was in a very mean mood. He told me to beat it before he killed me. I was intending to leave, anyway.”

“And nobody stopped you?”

“He wanted to get rid of me.”

“What about Sipe?”

“He was so drunk he hardly knew what he was doing. He passed out before I left.”

“What time did you leave?”

“A little after eight. It wasn’t dark yet. I caught a bus at the corner.”

“You weren’t there when Dick Leandro arrived?”

“No sir.”

His eyes widened. “Was he at the hotel?”

“Evidently he was. Did Sipe or Harley ever mention him?”

“No sir.”

“Do you know what he might have been doing there?”

“No sir. I don’t know much about him. He’s their friend.”

He shrugged one shoulder and arm toward the front of the house.

“Whose friend in particular? His or hers?”

“His. But she uses him, too.”

“To drive her places?”

“For anything she wants.”

He spoke with the hurt ineffectual anger of a displaced son. “When he does something she wants, she says she’ll leave him money in her will. If he doesn’t, like when he has a date, she says she’ll cut him out. So usually he breaks the date.”

“Would he kill someone for her?”

Mrs. Perez had turned off the hot water. In the steamy silence at her end of the kitchen, she made an explosive noise that sounded like “Chuh!”

“I don’t know what he’d do,” Tom said deliberately. “He’s a yacht bum and they’re all the same, but they’re all different, too. It would depend on how much risk there was in it. And how much money.”

“Harley,” I said, “was stabbed with the knife your father gave you, the hunting knife with the striped handle.”

“I didn’t stab him.”

“Where did you last see the knife?”

He considered the question. “It was in my room, in the top drawer with the handkerchiefs and stuff.”

“Did Dick Leandro know where it was?”

“I never showed him. He never came to my room.”

“Did your mother – did Elaine Hillman know where it was?”

“I guess so. She’s always– she was always coming into my room, and checking on my things.”

“That’s true,” Mrs. Perez said.

I acknowledged her comment with a look which discouraged further comment.

“I understand on a certain Sunday morning she came into your room once too often. You threatened to shoot her with your father’s gun.”

Mrs. Perez made her explosive noise. Tom bit hard on the tip of his right thumb. His look was slanting, over my head and to one side, as if there was someone behind me.

“Is that the story they’re telling?” he said.

Mrs. Perez burst out: “It isn’t true. I heard her yelling up there. She came downstairs and got the gun out of the library desk and went upstairs with it.”

“Why didn’t you stop her?”

“I was afraid,” she said. “Anyway, Mr. Hillman was coming – I heard his car – and I went outside and told him there was trouble upstairs. What else could I do, with Perez away in Mexico?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Tom said. “Nothing happened. I took the gun away from her.”

“Did she try to shoot you?”

“She said she would if I didn’t take back what I said.”

“And what did you say?”

“That I’d rather live in an auto court with my real mother than in this house with her. She blew her top and ran downstairs and got the gun.”

“Why didn’t you tell your father about this?”

“He isn’t my father.”

I didn’t argue. It took more than genes to establish fatherhood. “Why didn’t you tell him, Tom?”

He made an impatient gesture with his hand. “What was the use? He wouldn’t have believed me. Anyway, I was mad at her, for lying to me about who I was. I did take the gun and point it at her head.”

“And want to kill her?”

He nodded. His head seemed very heavy on his neck. Mrs. Perez invented a sudden errand and bustled past him, pressing his shoulder with her hand as she went. As if to signalize this gesture, an electric bell rang over the pantry door.

“That’s the front door,” she said to nobody in particular.

I got there in a dead heat with Ralph Hillman. He let Dick Leandro in. The week’s accelerated aging process was working in Leandro now. Only his dark hair seemed lively. His face was drawn and slightly yellowish. He gave me a lackluster glance, and appealed to Hillman: “Could I talk to you alone, Skipper? It’s important.”

He was almost chattering.

Elaine spoke from the doorway of the sitting room: “It can’t be so important that you’d forget your manners. Come in and be sociable, Dick. I’ve been alone all evening, or so it seems.”

“We’ll join you later,” Hillman said.

“It’s very late already.”

Her voice was edgy.

Leandro’s dim brown glance moved back and forth between them like a spectator’s at a tennis game on which he had bet everything he owned.

“If you’re not nice to me,” she said lightly, “I won’t be nice to you, Dick.”

“I do-don’t care about that.”

There was strained defiance in his voice.

“You will.”

Stiff-backed, she retreated into the sitting room.

I said to Leandro: “We won’t waste any more time. Did you do some driving for Mrs. Hillman last night?”

He turned away from me and almost leaned on Hillman, speaking in a hushed rapid voice. “I’ve got to talk to you alone. Something’s come up that you don’t know about.”

“We’ll go into the library,” Hillman said.

“If you do, I go along,” I said. “But we might as well talk here. I don’t want to get too far from Mrs. Hillman.”

The young man turned and looked at me in a different way, both lost and relieved. He knew I knew.

Hillman also knew, I thought. His proposal to Susanna tended to prove it; his confession that Tom was his natural son had provided me with evidence of motive. He leaned now on the wall beside the door, heavy and mysterious as a statue, with half-closed eyes.

I said to the younger man: “Did you drive her to the Barcelona Hotel, Dick?”

“Yessir.”

With one shoulder high and his head on one side, he held himself in an awkward pose which gave the effect of writhing. “I had no w-way of knowing what was on her mind. I still don’t know.”

“But you have a pretty good idea. Why all the secrecy?”

“She said I should borrow a car, that they had phoned for more money and Skipper wasn’t here so we would have to deliver it. Or else they’d kill him. We were to keep it secret from the police, and afterwards she said I must never tell anyone.”

“And you believed her story?”

“I c-certainly did.”

“When did you start to doubt it?”

“Well, I couldn’t figure out how she could get hold of all that c-cash.”

“How much?”

“Another twenty-five thousand, she said. She said it was in her bag – she was carrying her big knitting bag – but I didn’t actually see the money.”

“What did you see?”

“I didn’t actually see anything.”

Like a stealthy animal that would eventually take over his entire forehead, his hair was creeping down toward his eyes. “I mean, I saw this character, the one she– I saw this character come out of the hotel and they went around the back and I heard this scream.”

He scratched the front of his throat.

“What did you do?”

“I stayed in the car. She told me to stay in the car. When she came back, she said it was an owl.”

“And you believed her?”

“I don’t know much about birds. Do I, Skipper?”

Elaine cried out very brightly from her doorway: “What under heaven are you men talking about?”

I walked toward her. “You. The owl you heard last night in the hotel garden. What kind of an owl was it?”

“A screech–” Her hand flew up and pressed against her lips.

“He looked human to me. He wasn’t a very good specimen, but he was human.”

She stopped breathing, and then gasped for breath. “He was a devil,” she said, “the scum of the earth.”

“Because he wanted more money?”

“It would have gone on and on. I had to stop him.”

She stood shuddering in the doorway. With a fierce effort of will, she brought her emotions under control. “Speaking of money, I can take care of you. I’m sure the police would understand my position, but there’s no need to connect me with this– this–” She couldn’t think of a noun. “I can take care of you and I can take care of Dick.”

“How much are you offering?”

She looked at me imperiously, from the moral stilts of inherited wealth.

“Come into the sitting room,” she said, “and we’ll talk about it.”

The three of us followed her into the room and took up positions around her chesterfield. Hillman looked at me curiously. He was very silent and subdued, but the calculator behind his eyes was still working. Dick Leandro was coming back to life. His eyes had brightened. Perhaps he still imagined that somehow, sometime, there would be Hillman money coming to him.

“How much?” I said to her.

“Twenty-five thousand.”

“That’s better than a knife between the ribs. Does that mean twenty-five thousand overall or twenty-five thousand for each murder?”

“Each murder?”

“There were two, done with the same knife, almost certainly by the same person. You.”

She moved her head away from my pointing finger, like a stage-shy girl. A stage-shy girl playing the role of an aging woman with monkey wrinkles and fading fine blonde hair.

“Fifty thousand then,” she said.

“He’s playing with you,” Hillman said. “You can’t buy him.”

She turned toward him. “My late father once said that you can buy anyone, anyone at all. I proved that when I bought you.”

She made a gesture of repugnance. “I wish I hadn’t. You turned out to be a bad bargain.”

“You didn’t buy me. You merely leased my services.”

They faced each other as implacably as two skulls. She said: “Did you have to palm her bastard off on me?”

“I wanted a son. I didn’t plan it. It happened.”

“You made it happen. You connived to bring her baby into my house. You let me feed and nurture him and call him mine. How could you be such a living falsity?”

“Don’t talk to me about falsity, Elaine. It seemed the best way to handle the problem.”

“Stallion,” she said. “Filth.”

I heard a faint movement in the adjoining room. Straining my eyes into the darkness, I could see Tom sitting on the bench in front of the grand piano. I was tempted to shut the door, but it was too late, really. He might as well hear it all.

Hillman said in a surprisingly calm voice: “I never could understand the Puritan mind, Ellie. You think a little fun in bed is the ultimate sin, worse than murder. Christ, I remember our wedding night. You’d have thought I was murdering you.”

“I wish you had.”

“I almost wish I had. You murdered Carol, didn’t you, Ellie?”

“Of course I did. She phoned here Monday morning, after you left. Tom had given her his telephone number. I took the call in his room, and she spilled out everything. She said she had just caught on to her husband’s plans, and she was afraid he would harm Tom, who wasn’t really his son. I’m sure it was just an excuse she used to get her knife into me.”

“Her knife?” I said.

“That was a badly chosen image, wasn’t it? I mean that she was glorying over me, annulling the whole meaning of my existence.”

“I think she was simply trying to save her son.”

“Her son, not mine. Her son and Ralph’s. That was the point, don’t you see? I felt as if she had killed me. I was just a fading ghost in the world, with only enough life left to strike back. Walking from where I left the Cadillac, I could feel the rain fall through me. I was no solider than the rain.

“Apparently her husband had caught her phoning me. He took her back to their cottage and beat her and left her unconscious on the floor. She was easy for me to kill. The knife slipped in and out. I hadn’t realized how easy it would be.

“But the second time wasn’t easy,” she said. “The knife caught in his ribs. I couldn’t pull it out of him.”

Her voice was high and childish in complaint. The little girl behind her wrinkles had been caught in a malign world where even things no longer cooperated and even men could not be bought.

“Why did you have to stick it into him?” I said.

“He suspected that I killed Carol. He used Tom’s number to call me and accuse me. Of course he wanted money.”

She spoke as if her possession of money had given her a special contemptuous insight into other people’s hunger for it. “It would have gone on and on.”

It was going on and on. Tom came blinking out of the darkness. He looked around in pity and confusion. Elaine turned her face away from him, as if she had an unprepossessing disease.

The boy said to Hillman: “Why didn’t you tell me? It could have made a difference.”

“It still can,” Hillman said with a hopefulness more grinding than despair. “Son?”

He moved toward Tom, who evaded his outstretched hands and left the room. Walking rather unsteadily, Hillman followed him. I could hear them mounting the stairs, on different levels, out of step.

Dick Leandro got up from his place, rather tentatively, as if he had been liberated from an obscure bondage. He went into the alcove, where I heard him making himself a drink.

Elaine Hillman was still thinking about money. “What about it, Mr. Archer? Can you be bought?”

Her voice was quite calm. The engines of her anger had run down.

“I can’t be bought with anything you’ve offered.”

“Will you have mercy on me, then?”

“I don’t have that much mercy.”

“I’m not asking for a great deal. Just let me sleep one more night in my own house.”

“What good would that do you?”

“This good. I’ll be frank with you. I’ve been saving sleeping pills for a considerable time–”

“How long?”

“Nearly a year, actually. I’ve been in despair for at least that long–”

“You should have taken your pills sooner.”

“Before all this, you mean?”

She waved her hand at the empty room as if it was a tragic stage littered with corpses.

“Before all this,” I said.

“But I couldn’t die without knowing. I knew my life was empty and meaningless. I had to find out why.”

“And now it’s full and meaningful?”

“It’s over,” she said. “Look, Mr. Archer, I was frank with you today. Give me a quid pro quo. All I’m asking for is time to use my pills.”

“No.”

“You owe me something. I helped you as much as I dared this afternoon.”

“You weren’t trying to help me, Mrs. Hillman. You only told me what I already knew, or what I was about to find out. You gave me the fact that Tom was adopted in such a way that it would conceal the more important fact that he was your husband’s natural son. You kept alive the lie that your husband was sterile because it hid your motive for murdering Carol Harley.”

“I’m afraid your reasoning is much too subtle for me.”

“I hardly think so. You’re a subtle woman.”

“I? Subtle? I’m a ninny, a poor booby. The people in the streets, the scum of the earth knew more about my life than I–” She broke off: “So you won’t help me.”

“I can’t. I’m sorry. The police are on their way now.”

She regarded me thoughtfully. “There would still be time for me to use the gun.”

“No.”

“You’re very hard.”

“It, isn’t me, really, Mrs. Hillman. It’s just reality catching up.”

The sheriffs car was in the driveway now. I rose and went as far as the sitting-room door and called out to Bastian to come in. Elaine sighed behind me like a woman in passion.

Her passion was a solitary one. She had picked up her knitting in both hands and pressed both steel needles into her breast. She struck them into herself again before I reached her.

By the middle of the following day she had succeeded in dying.

The End