The Far Side of the Dollar

Chapter 4

THE HILLMANS’ PRIVATE drive meandered up an oak-covered rise and circled around in a lawn in front of their house. It was a big old Spanish mansion, with white stucco walls, wrought-iron ornamentation at the windows, red tile roof gleaming dully in the wet. A bright black Cadillac was parked in the circle ahead of us.

“I meant to drive myself this morning,” Hillman said. “But then I didn’t trust myself to drive. Thanks for the lift.”

It sounded like a dismissal. He started up the front steps, and I felt a keen disappointment. I swallowed it and went after him, slipping inside the front door before he closed it.

It was his wife he was preoccupied with. She was waiting for him in the reception hall, bowed forward in a high-backed Spanish chair which made her look tinier than she was. Her snakeskin shoes hung clear of the polished tile floor. She was a beautifully made thin blonde woman in her forties. An aura of desolation hung about her, a sense of uselessness, as if she was in fact the faded doll she resembled. Her green dress went poorly with her almost greenish pallor.

“Elaine?”

She had been sitting perfectly still, with her knees and fists together. She looked up at her husband, and then over his head at the huge Spanish chandelier suspended on a chain from the beamed ceiling two stories up. Its bulbs protruded like dubious fruit from clusters of wrought-iron leaves.

“Don’t stand under it,” she said. “I’m always afraid it’s going to fall. I wish you’d have it taken down, Ralph.”

“It was your idea to bring it back and put it there.”

“That was a long time ago,” she said. “I thought the space needed filling.”

“It still does, and it’s still perfectly safe.”

He moved toward her and touched her head. “You’re wet. You shouldn’t have gone out in your condition.”

“I just walked down the drive to see if you were coming. You were gone a long time.”

“I couldn’t help it.”

She took his hand as it slid away from her head, and held it against her breast. “Did you hear anything?”

“We can’t expect to hear anything yet for a while. I made arrangements for the money. Dick Leandro will bring it out later this afternoon. In the meantime we wait for a phone call.”

“It’s hideous, waiting.”

“I know. You should try to think about something else.”

“What else is there?”

“Lots of things.”

I think he tried to name one, and gave up. “Anyway, it isn’t good for you to be sitting out here in the cold hall. You’ll give yourself pneumonia again.”

“People don’t give it to themselves, Ralph.”

“We won’t argue. Come into the sitting room and I’ll make you a drink.”

He remembered me and included me in the invitation, but he didn’t introduce me to his wife. Perhaps he considered me unworthy, or perhaps he wanted to discourage communication between us. Feeling rather left out, I followed them up three tile steps into a smaller room where a fire was burning. Elaine Hillman stood with her back to it. Her husband went to the bar, which was in an alcove decorated with Spanish bullfight posters.

She held out her hand to me. It was ice cold. “I don’t mean to monopolize the heat. Are you a policeman? I thought we weren’t to use them.”

“I’m a private detective. Lew Archer is my name.”

Her husband called from the alcove: “What will you drink, darling?”

“Absinthe.”

“Is that such a good idea?”

“It has wormwood in it, which suits my mood. But I’ll settle for a short Scotch.”

“What about you, Mr. Archer?”

I asked for the same. I needed it. While I rather liked both of the Hillmans, they were getting on my nerves. Their joint handling of their anxiety was almost professional, as if they were actors improvising a tragedy before an audience of one. I don’t mean the anxiety wasn’t sincere. They were close to dying of it.

Hillman came back across the room with three lowball glasses on a tray. He set it down on a long table in front of the fireplace and handed each of us a glass. Then he shook up the wood fire with a poker. Flames hissed up the chimney. Their reflection changed his face for a moment to a red savage mask.

His wife’s face hung like a dead moon over her drink. “Our son is very dear to us, Mr. Archer. Can you help us get him back?”

“I can try. I’m not sure it’s wise to keep the police out of this. I’m only one man, and this isn’t my normal stomping ground.”

“Does that make a difference?”

“I have no informers here.”

“Do you hear him, Ralph?” she said to her crouching husband. “Mr. Archer thinks we should have the police in.”

“I hear him. But it isn’t possible.”

He straightened up with a sigh, as if the whole weight of the house was on his shoulders. “I’m not going to endanger Tom’s life by anything I do.”

“I feel the same way,” she said. “I’m willing to pay through the nose to get him back. What use is money without a son to spend it on?”

That was another phrase that was faintly strange. I was getting the impression that Tom was the center of the household, but a fairly unknown center, like a god they made sacrifices to and expected benefits from, and maybe punishments, too. I was beginning to sympathize with Tom.

“Tell me about him, Mrs. Hillman.”

Some life came up into her dead face. But before she could open her mouth Hillman said: “No. You’re not going to put Elaine through that now.”

“But Tom’s a pretty shadowy figure to me. I’m trying to get some idea of where he might have gone yesterday, how he got tangled up with extortionists.”

“I don’t know where he went,” the woman said.

“Neither do I. If I had,” Hillman said, “I’d have gone to him yesterday.”

“Then I’m going to have to go out and do some legwork. You can let me have a picture, I suppose.”

Hillman went into an adjoining room, twilit behind pulled drapes, where the open top of a grand piano leaned up out of the shadows. He came back with a silver-framed studio photograph of a boy whose features resembled his own. The boy’s dark eyes were rebellious, unless I was projecting my own sense of the household into them. They were also intelligent and imaginative. His mouth was spoiled.

“Can I take this out of the frame? Or if you have a smaller one, it would be better to show around.”

“To show around?”

“That’s what I said, Mr. Hillman. It’s not for my memory book.”

Elaine Hillman said: “I have a smaller one upstairs on my dressing table. I’ll get it.”

“Why don’t I go up with you? It might help if I went through his room.”

“You can look at his room,” Hillman said, “but I don’t want you searching it.”

“Why?”

“I just don’t like the idea. Tom has the right to some privacy, even now.”

The three of us went upstairs, keeping an eye on each other. I wondered what Hillman was afraid I might find, but I hesitated to ask him. While everything seemed to be under control, Hillman could flare up at any moment and order me out of his house.

He stood at the door while I gave the room a quick once-over. It was a front bedroom, very large, furnished with plain chests of drawers and chairs and a table and a bed which all looked hand-finished and expensive. A bright red telephone sat on the bedside table. There were engravings of sailing ships and Audubon prints hung with geometric precision around the walls, Navajo rugs on the floor, and a wool bedspread matching one of them.

I turned to Hillman. “Was he interested in boats and sailing?”

“Not particularly. He used to come out and crew for me occasionally, on the sloop, when I couldn’t get anyone else. Does it matter?”

“I was just wondering if he hung around the harbor much.”

“No. He didn’t.”

“Was he interested in birds?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Who chose the pictures?”

“I did,” Elaine Hillman said from the hallway. “I decorated the room for Tom. He liked it, didn’t he, Ralph?”

Hillman mumbled something. I crossed the room to the deeply set front windows, which overlooked the semicircular driveway. I could see down the wooded slope, across the golf course, all the way to the highway, where cars rolled back and forth like children’s toys out of reach. I could imagine Tom sitting here in the alcove and watching the highway lights at night.

A thick volume of music lay open on the leather seat. I looked at the cover. It was a well-used copy of The Well-Tempered Clavier.

“Did Tom play the piano, Mr. Hillman?”

“Very well. He had ten years of lessons. But then he wanted–” His wife made a small dismayed sound at his shoulder. “Why go into all that?”

“All what?” I said. “Trying to get information out of you people is like getting blood out of a stone.”

“I feel like a bloodless stone,” she said with a little grimace. “This hardly seems the time to rake up old family quarrels.”

“We didn’t quarrel,” her husband said. “It was the one thing Tom and I ever disagreed on. And he went along with me on it. End of subject.”

“All right. Where did he spend his time away from home?”

The Hillmans looked at each other, as if the secret of Tom’s whereabouts was somehow hidden in each other’s faces. The red telephone interrupted their dumb communion, like a loud thought. Elaine Hillman gasped. The photograph in her hand fell to the floor. She wilted against her husband.

He held her up. “It wouldn’t be for us. That’s Tom’s private telephone.”

“You want me to take it?” I said through the second ring.

“Please do.”

I sat on the bed and picked up the receiver. “Hello.”

“Tom?” said a high, girlish voice. “Is that you, Tommy?”

“Who is this calling?” I tried to sound like a boy.

The girl said something like “Augh” and hung up on me.

I set down the receiver: “It was a girl or a young woman. She wanted Tom.”

The woman spoke with a touch of malice that seemed to renew her strength: “That’s nothing unusual. I’m sure it was Stella Carlson. She’s been calling all week.”

“Does she always hang up like that?”

“No. I talked to her yesterday. She was full of questions, which of course I refused to answer. But I wanted to make sure that she hadn’t seen Tom. She hadn’t.”

“Does she know anything about what’s happened?”

“I hope not,” Hillman said. “We’ve got to keep it in the family. The more people know, the worse–” He left another sentence dangling in the air.

I moved away from the telephone and picked up the fallen photograph. In a kind of staggering march step, Elaine Hillman went to the bed and straightened out the bedspread where I had been sitting. Everything had to be perfect in the room, I thought, or the god would not be appeased and would never return to them. When she had finished smoothing the bed, she flung herself face down on it and lay still.

Hillman and I withdrew quietly and went downstairs to wait for the call that mattered. There was a phone in the bar alcove off the sitting room, and another in the butler’s pantry, which I could use to listen in. To get to the butler’s pantry we had to go through the music room, where the grand piano loomed, and across a formal dining room which had a dismal air, like a reconstructed room in a museum.

The past was very strong here, like an odor you couldn’t quite place. It seemed to be built into the very shape of the house, with its heavy dark beams and thick walls and deep windows; it would almost force the owner of the house to feel like a feudal lord. But the role of hidalgo hung loosely on Hillman, like something borrowed for a costume party. He and his wife must have rattled around in the great house, even when the boy was there.

Back in the sitting room, in front of the uncertain fire, I had a chance to ask Hillman some more questions. The Hillmans had two servants; a Spanish couple named Perez who had looked after Tom from infancy. Mrs. Perez was probably out in the kitchen. Her husband was in Mexico, visiting his family.

“You know he’s in Mexico?”

“Well,” Hillman said, “his wife has had a card from Sinaloa. Anyway, the Perezes are devoted to us, and to Tom. We’ve had them with us ever since we moved here and bought this house.”

“How long ago was that?”

“Over sixteen years. We moved here, the three of us, after I was separated from the Navy. Another engineer and I founded our own firm here, Technological Enterprises. We’re had very gratifying success, supplying components to the military and then NASA. I was able to go into semi retirement not long ago.”

“You’re young to retire, Mr. Hillman.”

“Perhaps.”

He looked around a little restlessly, as if he disliked talking about himself. “I’m still the chairman of the board, of course. I go down to the office several mornings a week. I play a lot of golf, do a lot of hunting and sailing.”

He sounded weary of his life. “This summer I’ve been teaching Tom calculus. It isn’t available in his high school. I thought it would come in handy if he made it to Cal Tech or MIT I went to MIT myself. Elaine was a student at Radcliffe. She was born on Beacon Street, you know.”

We’re prosperous and educated people, he seemed to be saying, first-class citizens: how can the world have aimed such a dirty blow at us? He leaned his large face forward until his hands supported it again.

The telephone rang in the alcove. I heard it ring a second time as I skidded around the end of the dining-room table. At the door of the butler’s pantry I almost knocked down a small round woman who was wiping her hands on her apron. Her emotional dark eyes recoiled from my face.

“I was going to answer it,” she said.

“I will, Mrs. Perez.”

She retreated into the kitchen and I closed the door after her. The only light in the pantry came through the semicircular hatch to the dining room. The telephone was on the counter inside it, no longer ringing. Gently I raised the receiver.

“What was that?” a man’s voice said. “You got the FBI on the line or something?”

The voice was a western drawl with a faint whine in it.

“Certainly not. I’ve followed your instructions to the letter.”

“I hope I can believe you, Mr. Hillman. If I thought you were having this call traced I’d hang up and goodbye Tom.”

The threat came easily, with a kind of flourish, as if the man enjoyed this kind of work.

“Don’t hang up.”

Hillman’s voice was both pleading and loathing. “I have the money for you, at least I’ll have it here in a very short while. I’ll be ready to deliver it whenever you say.”

“Twenty-five thousand in small bills?”

“There will be nothing larger than a twenty.”

“All unmarked?”

“I told you I’ve obeyed you to the letter. My son’s safety is all I care about.”

“I’m glad you get the picture, Mr. Hillman. You pick up fast, and I like that. Matter of fact, I hate to do this to you. And I’d certainly hate to do anything to this fine boy of yours.”

“Is Tom with you now?” Hillman said.

“More or less. He’s nearby.”

“Could I possibly talk to him?”

“No.”

“How do I know he’s alive?”

The man was silent for a long moment. “You don’t trust me, Mr. Hillman. I don’t like that.”

“How can I trust–?” Hillman bit the sentence in half.

“I know what you were going to say. How can you trust a lousy creep like me? That isn’t our problem, Hillman. Our problem is can I trust a creep like you. I know more about you than you think I do, Hillman.”

Silence, in which breath wheezed.

“Well, can I?”

“Can you what?” Hillman said in near-despair.

“Can I trust you, Hillman?”

“You can trust me.”

Wheezing silence. The wheeze was in the man’s voice when he spoke again: “I guess I’ll have to take your word for it, Hillman. Okay. You’d probably like to talk all day about what a creep I am, but it’s time to get down to brass tacks. I want my money, and this isn’t ransom money, get that straight. Your son wasn’t kidnapped, he came to us of his own free will–”

“I don’t–” Hillman strangled the words in his throat.

“You don’t believe me? Ask him, if you ever have a chance. You’re throwing away your chances, you realize that? I’m trying to help you pay me the money – the information money, that’s all it is – but you keep calling me names, liar and creep and God knows what else.”

“No. There’s nothing personal.”

“That’s what you think.”

“Look here,” Hillman said. “You said it’s time to get down to brass tacks. Simply tell me where and when you want the money delivered. It will be delivered. I guarantee it.”

Hillman’s voice was sharp. The man at the other end of the line reacted to sharpness perversely:

“Don’t be in such a hurry. I’m calling the shots, you better not forget it.”

“Then call them,” Hillman said.

“In my own good time. I think I better give you a chance to think this over, Hillman. Get down off your high horse and down on you knees. That’s where you belong.” He hung up.

Hillman was standing in the alcove with the receiver still in his hand when I got back to the sitting room. Absently he replaced it on its brackets and came toward me, shaking his silver head.

“He wouldn’t give me any guarantees about Tom.”

“I heard him. They never do. You have to depend on his mercy.”

“His mercy! He was talking like a maniac. He seemed to revel in the– in the pain.”

“I agree, he was getting his kicks. Let’s hope he’s satisfied with the kicks he’s already got, and the money.”

Hillman’s head went down. “You think Tom is in danger, don’t you?”

“Yes. I don’t think you are dealing with an outright maniac, but the man didn’t sound too well-balanced. I think he’s an amateur, or possibly a petty thief who saw his chance to move in on the heavy stuff. More likely a gifted amateur. Is he the same man who called this morning?”

“Yes.”

“He may be working alone. Is there any chance that you could recognize his voice? There was some hint of a personal connection, maybe a grievance. Could he be a former employee of yours, for example?”

“I very much doubt it. We only employ skilled workers. This fellow sounded practically subhuman.” His face became gaunter. “And you tell me I’m at his mercy.”

“Your son is. Could there be any truth in what he said about Tom going to him voluntarily?”

“Of course not. Tom is a good boy.”

“How is his judgment?”

Hillman didn’t answer me, except by implication. He went to the bar, poured himself a stiff drink out of a bourbon bottle, and knocked it back. I followed him to the bar.

“Is there any possible chance that Tom cooked up this extortion deal himself, with the help of one of his buddies, or maybe with hired help?”

He hefted the glass in his hand, as if he was thinking of throwing it at my head. I caught a glimpse of his red angry mask before he turned away. “It’s quite impossible. Why do you have to torment me with these ideas?”

“I don’t know your son. You ought to.”

“He’d never do a thing like that to me.”

“You put him in Laguna Perdida School.”

“I had to.”

“Why?”

He turned on me furiously. “You keep hammering away at the same stupid question. What has it got to do with anything?”

“I’m trying to find out just how far gone Tom is. If there was reason to think that he kidnapped himself, to punish you or raise money, we’d want to turn the police loose–”

“You’re crazy!”

“Is Tom?”

“Of course not. Frankly, Mr. Archer, I’m getting sick of you and your questions. If you want to stay in my house, it’s got to be on my terms.”

I was tempted to walk out, but something held me. The case was getting its hooks into my mind.

Hillman filled his glass with whisky and drank half of it down.

“If I were you, I’d lay off the sauce,” I said. “You have decisions to make. This could be the most important day of your life.”

He nodded slowly. “You’re right.”

He reached across the bar and poured the rest of his whisky into the metal sink. Then he excused himself, and went upstairs to see to his wife.