The Far Side of the Dollar

Chapter 2

EAST HALL WAS a sprawling one-story stucco building, which somehow didn’t belong on that expansive landscape. Its mean and unprepossessing air had something to do with the high little windows, all of them heavily screened. Or with the related fact that it was a kind of prison which pretended not to be. The spiky pyracantha shrubs bordering the lawn in front of the building were more like barriers than ornaments. The grass looked dispirited even in the rain.

So did the line of boys who were marching in the front door as I came up. Boys of all ages from twelve to twenty, boys of all shapes and sizes, with only one thing in common: they marched like members of a defeated army. They reminded me of the very young soldiers we captured on the Rhine in the last stages of the last war.

Two students’ leaders kept them in some sort of line. I followed them, into a big lounge furnished with rather dilapidated furniture. The two leaders went straight to a ping-pong table that stood in one corner, picked up paddles, and began to play a rapid intense game with a ball that one of them produced from his windbreaker pocket. Six or seven boys began to watch them. Four or five settled down with comic books. Most of the rest of them stood around and watched me.

A hairy-faced young fellow who ought to have started to shave came up to me smiling. His smile was brilliant, but it faded like an optical illusion. He came so close that his shoulder nudged my arm. Some dogs will nudge you like that, to test your friendliness.

“Are you the new supervisor?”

“No. I thought Mr. Patch was the supervisor.”

“He won’t last.”

A few of the younger boys giggled. The hairy one responded like a successful comedian. “This is the violent ward. They never last.”

“It doesn’t look so violent to me. Where is Mr. Patch?”

“Over at dining commons. He’ll be here in a minute. Then we have organized fun.”

“You sound pretty cynical for your age. How old are you?”

“Ninety-nine.” His audience murmured encouragingly. “Mr. Patch is only forty-nine. It makes it hard for him to be my father-image.”

“Maybe I could talk to Mrs. Mallow.”

“She’s in her room drinking her lunch. Mrs. Mallow always drinks her lunch.”

The bright malice in his eyes alternated with a darker feeling. “Are you a father?”

“No.”

In the background the ping-pong ball was clicking back and forth like mindless conversation.

A member of the audience spoke up. “He’s not a father.”

“Maybe he’s a mother,” said the hairy boy. “Are you a mother?”

“He doesn’t look like a mother. He has no bosoms.”

“My mother has no bosoms,” said a third one. “That’s why I feel rejected.”

“Come off it, boys.”

The hell of it was, they wished I was a father, or even a mother, one of theirs, and the wish stood in their eyes. “You don’t want me to feel rejected, do you?”

Nobody answered. The hairy boy smiled up at me. It lasted a little longer than his first smile. “What’s your name? I’m Frederick Tyndal the Third.”

“I’m Lew Archer the First.”

I drew the boy away from his audience. He pulled back from my touch, but he came along and sat down with me on a cracked leather couch. Some of the younger boys had put an overplayed record on a player. Two of them began to dance together to the raucous self-parodying song. “Surfin’ ain’t no sin,” was the refrain.

“Did you know Tom Hillman, Fred?”

“A little. Are you his father?”

“No. I said I wasn’t a father.”

“Adults don’t necessarily tell you the truth.”

He plucked at the hairs on his chin as if he hated the signs of growing up. “My father said he was sending me away to military school. He’s a big shot in the government,” he added flatly, without pride, and then, in a different tone: “Tom Hillman didn’t get along with his father, either. So he got railroaded here. The Monorail to the Magic Kingdom.”

He produced a fierce ecstatic hopeless grin.

“Did Tom talk to you about it?”

“A little. He wasn’t here long. Five days. Six. He came in Sunday night and took off Saturday night.”

He squirmed uneasily on the creaking leather. “Are you a cop?”

“No.”

“I just wondered. You ask questions like a cop.”

“Did Tom do something that would interest the cops?”

“We all do, don’t we?”

His hot and cold running glance went around the room, pausing on the forlorn antics of the dancing boys. “You don’t qualify for East Hall unless you’re a juvie. I was a criminal mastermind myself. I forged the big shot’s name on a fifty-dollar check and went to San Francisco for the weekend.”

“What did Tom do?”

“Stole a car, I guess. It was a first offense, he said, and he would of got probation easy. But his father didn’t want the publicity, so he put him in here. Also, I guess Tom had a fight with his father.”

“I see.”

“Why are you so fascinated in Tom?”

“I’m supposed to find him, Fred.”

“And bring him back here?”

“I doubt that they’ll readmit him.”

“He’s lucky.”

More or less unconsciously, he moved against me again. I could smell the untended odor of his hair and body, and sense his desolation. “I’d break out of here myself if I had a place to go. But the big shot would turn me over to the Youth Authority. It would save him money, besides.”

“Did Tom have a place to go?”

He jerked upright and looked at my eyes from the corners of his. “I didn’t say that.”

“I’m asking you.”

“He wouldn’t tell me if he had.”

“Who was closest to him in the school?”

“He wasn’t close to anybody. He was so upset when he came in, they put him in a room by himself. I went in and talked to him one night, but he didn’t say much to me.”

“Nothing about where he planned to go?”

“He didn’t plan anything. He tried to start a riot Saturday night but the rest of us were chicken. So he took off. He seemed to be very excited.”

“Was he emotionally disturbed?”

“Aren’t we all?”

He tapped his own temple and made an insane face. “You ought to see my Rorschach.”

“Some other time.”

“Be my guest.”

“This is important, Fred. Tom is very young, and excited, as you said. He’s been missing for two nights now, and he could get into very serious trouble.”

“Worse than this?”

“You know it, or you’d be over the fence yourself. Did Tom say anything about where he was going?”

The boy didn’t answer.

“Then I assume he did tell you something?”

“No.”

But he wouldn’t meet my eyes.

Mr. Patch came into the room and changed its carefree atmosphere. The dancing boys pretended to be wrestling. Comic books disappeared like bundles of hot money. The ping-pong players put away their ball.

Patch was a middle-aged man with thinning hair and thickening jowls. His double-breasted tan gabardine suit was creased across his rather corpulent front. His face was creased, too, into a sneer of power, which didn’t go with his sensitive small mouth. As he looked around the room, I could see that the whites of his eyes were tinted with red.

He strode to the record player and turned it off, insinuating his voice into the silence: “Lunchtime isn’t music time, boys. Music time is after dinner, from seven to seven-thirty.”

He addressed one of the ping-pong players: “Bear that in mind, Deering. No music in the daytime. I’ll hold you responsible.”

“Yessir.”

“And weren’t you playing ping-pone”

“We were just rallying, sir.”

“Where did you get the ball? I understood the balls were locked up in my desk.”

“They are, sir.”

“Where did you get the one you were playing with?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

Deering fumbled at his windbreaker. He was a gawky youth with an Adam’s apple that looked like a hidden ping-pong ball. “I think I must of found it.”

“Where did you find it? In my desk?”

“No sir. On the grounds, I think it was.”

Mr. Patch walked toward him with a kind of melodramatic stealth. As he moved across the room, the boys behind him made faces, waved their arms, did bumps and grinds. One boy, one of the dancers, fell silently to the floor with a throat-slitting gesture, held the pose of a dying gladiator for a single frozen second, then got back onto his feet.

Patch was saying in a long-suffering tone: “You bought it, didn’t you, Deering? You know that regulations forbid you fellows to bring in private ping-pong balls of your own. You know that, don’t you? You’re president of the East Hall Legislative Assembly, you helped to frame those regulations yourself. Didn’t you?”

“Yessir.”

“Then give it to me, Deering.”

The boy handed Patch the ball. Patch stooped to place it on the floor – while a boy behind him pretended to kick him – and squashed it under his heel. He gave Deering the misshapen ball.

“I’m sorry, Deering. I have to obey the regulations just as you do.”

He turned to the roomful of boys, who snapped into conformity under his eyes, and said mildly: “Well, fellows, what’s on the agenda–?”

“I think I am,” I said, getting up from the couch. I gave him my name and asked if I could talk to him in private.

“I suppose so,” he said with a worried smile, as if I might in fact be his successor. “Come into my office, such as it is. Deering and Bronson, I’m leaving you in charge.”

His office was a windowless cubicle containing a cluttered desk and two straight chairs. He closed the door on the noise that drifted down the corridor from the lounge, turned on a desk lamp, and sat down sighing.

“You’ve got to stay on top of them.”

He sounded like a man saying his prayers. “You wanted to discuss one of my boys?”

“Tom Hillman.”

The name depressed him. “You represent his father?”

“No. Dr. Sponti sent me to talk to you. I’m a private detective.”

“I see.”

He pushed out his lips in a kind of pout. “I suppose Sponti’s been blaming me, as usual.”

“He did say something about unnecessary violence.”

“That’s nonsense!”

He pounded the desk between us with his clenched fist. His face became congested with blood. Then it went starkly pale, like a raw photograph. Only the reddish whites of his eyes held their color. “Sponti doesn’t work down here with the animals. I ought to know when physical discipline is necessary. I’ve been in juvenile work for twenty-five years.”

“It seems to be getting you down.”

With an effort that crumpled up his face, he brought himself under control. “Oh no, I love the work, I really do. Anyway, it’s the only thing I’m trained for. I love the boys. And they love me.”

“I could see that.”

He wasn’t listening for my irony. “I’d have been pals with Tom Hillman if he’d lasted.”

“Why didn’t he?”

“He ran away. You know that. He stole a pair of shears from the gardener and used it to cut the screen on his bedroom window.”

“Exactly when was this?”

“Sometime Saturday night, between my eleven-o’clock bedcheck and my early-morning one.”

“And what happened before that?”

“Saturday night, you mean? He was stirring up the other boys, inciting them to attack the resident staff: I’d left the common room after dinner, and I heard him from in here, making a speech. He was trying to convince the boys that they had been deprived of their rights and should fight for them. Some of the more excitable ones were affected. But when I ordered Hillman to shut up, he was the only one who rushed me.”

“Did he hit you?”

“I hit him first,” Patch said. “I’m not ashamed of it. I had to preserve my authority with the others.”

He rubbed his fist. “I knocked him cold. You have to make a show of manliness. When I hit them, they go down for the count. You have to give them an image to respect.”

I said to stop him: “What happened after that?”

“I helped him to his room, and then I reported the incident to Sponti. I thought the boy should be put in the padded room. But Sponti countermanded my advice. Hillman would never have broken out if Sponti had let me put him in the padded room. Just between you and me, it’s Sponti’s fault.”

He brought himself up short and said in a smaller voice: “Don’t quote me to him.”

“All right.”

I was beginning to despair of getting anything useful out of Patch. He was a little dilapidated, like the furniture in the common room. The noise coming from that direction was becoming louder. Patch rose wearily to his feet.

“I’d better get back there before they tear the place down.”

“I just wanted to ask you, do you have any thoughts on where Tom Hillman went after he left here?”

Patch considered my question. He seemed to be having difficulty in imagining the outside world into which the boy had vanished. “LA,” he said finally. “They usually head for LA or else they head south for San Diego and the border.”

“Or east?”

“If their parents live east, they sometimes go that way.”

“Or west across the ocean?”

I was baiting him.

“That’s true. One boy stole a thirty-foot launch and headed for the islands.”

“You seem to have a lot of runaways.”

“Over the years, we have quite a turnover. Sponti’s opposed to strict security measures, like we used to have at juvenile Hall. With all the breakouts we’ve had, I’m surprised he wants to make such a production out of this one. The boy’ll turn up, they nearly always do.”

Patch sounded as if he wasn’t looking forward to the prospect.

Somebody tapped at the door behind me. “Mr. Patch?” a woman said through the panels.

“Yes, Mrs. Mallow.”

“The boys are getting out of hand. They won’t listen to me. What are you doing in there?”

“Conferring. Dr. Sponti sent a man.”

“Good. We need a man.”

“Is that so?”

He brushed past me and opened the door. “Keep your cracks to yourself, please, Mrs. Mallow. I know one or two things that Dr. Sponti would dearly love to know.”

“So do I,” the woman said.

She was heavily rouged, with dyed red hair arranged in bangs on her forehead. She had on a dark formal dress, about ten years out of fashion, and several loops of imitation pearls. Her face was pleasant enough, in spite of eyes that had been bleared by horrors inner and outer.

She brightened up when she saw me. “Hello.”

“My name is Archer,” I said. “Dr. Sponti brought me in to look into Tom Hillman’s disappearance.”

“He’s a nice-looking boy,” she said. “At least he was until our local Marquis de Sade gave him a working-over.”

“I acted in self-defense,” Patch cried. “I don’t enjoy hurting people. I’m the authority figure in East Hall, and when I’m attacked it’s just like killing their father.”

“You better go and make with the authority, Father. But if you hurt anybody this week I’ll carve the living heart out of your body.”

Patch looked at her as if he believed she might do it. Then he turned on his heel and strode away toward the roaring room. The roaring subsided abruptly, as if he had closed a soundproof door behind him.

“Poor old Patch,” said Mrs. Mallow. “He’s been around too long. Poor old all of us. Too many years of contact with the adolescent mind, if mind is the word, and eventually we all go blah.”

“Why stay?”

“We get so we can’t live in the outside world. Like old convicts. That’s the real hell of it.”

“People around here are extraordinarily ready to spill their problems–”

“It’s the psychiatric atmosphere.”

“But,” I went on, “they don’t tell me much I want to know. Can you give me a clear impression of Tom Hillman?”

“I can give you my own impression.”

She had a little difficulty with the word, and it seemed to affect her balance. She walked into Patch’s office and leaned on his desk facing me. Her face, half-shadowed in the upward light from the lamp, reminded me of a sibyl’s.

“Tom Hillman is a pretty nice boy. He didn’t belong here. He found that out in a hurry. And so he left.”

“Why didn’t he belong here?”

“You want me to go into detail? East Hall is essentially a place for boys with personality and character problems, or with a sociopathic tendency. We keep the more disturbed youngsters, boys and girls, in West Hall.”

“And Tom belonged there?”

“Hardly. He shouldn’t have been sent to Laguna Perdida at all. This is just my opinion, but it ought to be worth something. I used to be a pretty good clinical psychologist.”

She looked down into the light.

“Dr. Sponti seems to think Tom was disturbed.”

“Dr. Sponti never thinks otherwise, about any prospect. Do you know what these kids’ parents pay? A thousand dollars a month, plus extras. Music lessons. Group therapy.”

She laughed harshly. “When half the time it’s the parents who should be here. Or in some worse place.

“A thousand dollars a month,” she repeated. “So Dr. Sponti so-called can draw his twenty-five thousand a year. Which is more than six times what he pays me for holding the kids’ hands.”

She was a woman with a grievance. Sometimes grievances made for truth-telling, but not always. “What do you mean, Dr. Sponti so called?”

“He’s not a medical doctor, or any other kind of real doctor. He took his degree in educational administration, at one of the diploma mills down south. Do you know what he wrote his dissertation on? The kitchen logistics of the medium-sized boarding school.”

“Getting back to Tom,” I said, “why would his father bring him here if he didn’t need psychiatric treatment?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know his father. Probably because he wanted him out of his sight.”

“Why?” I insisted.

“The boy was in some kind of trouble.”

“Did Tom tell you that?”

“He wouldn’t talk about it. But I can read the signs.”

“Have you heard the story that he stole a car?”

“No, but it would help to explain him. He’s a very unhappy young man, and a guilty one. He isn’t one of your hardened J.D.’s. Not that any of them really are.”

“You seem to have liked Tom Hillman.”

“What little I saw of him. He didn’t want to talk last week, and I try never to force myself on the boys. Except for class hours, he spent most of the time in his room. I think he was trying to work something out.”

“Like a plan for revolution?”

Her eyes glinted with amusement. “You heard about that, did you? The boy had more gumption than I gave him credit for. Don’t look so surprised. I’m on the boys’ side. Why else would I be here?”

I was beginning to like Mrs. Mallow. Sensing this, she moved toward me and touched my arm. “I hope that you are, too. On Tom’s side, I mean.”

“I’ll wait until I know him. It isn’t important, anyway.”

“Yes it is. It’s always important.”

“Just what happened between Tom and Mr. Patch Saturday night?”

“I wouldn’t know, really. Saturday night is my night off. You can make a note of that if you like, Mr. Archer.”

She smiled, and I caught a glimpse of her life’s meaning. She cared for other people. Nobody cared for her.