The Far Side of the Dollar

Chapter 6

I MADE MY way back to the Hillmans’ house. It resembled a grim white fortress under the lowering sky. I didn’t feel like going in just now and grappling with the heavy, smothering fear that hung in the rooms. Anyway, I finally had a lead. Which Hillman could have given me if he’d wanted to.

Before I got into my car I looked up at the front window of Tom’s room. The Hillmans were sitting close together in the niche of the window, looking out. Hillman shook his head curtly: no phone call.

I drove into town and turned right off the highway onto the Main street. The stucco and frame buildings in this segment of town, between the highway and the railroad tracks, had been here a long time and been allowed to deteriorate. There were tamale parlors and pool halls and rummage stores and bars. The wet pavements were almost empty of people, as they always were when it rained in California.

I parked and locked my car in front of a surplus and sporting goods store and asked the proprietor where The Barroom Floor was. He pointed west, toward the ocean: “I don’t think they’re open, in the daytime. There’s lots of other places open.”

“What about Ringo’s auto yard?”

“Three blocks south on Sanger Street, that’s the first stop-light below the railroad tracks.”

I thanked him.

“You’re welcome, I’m sure.”

He was a middle-aged man with a sandy moustache, cheerfully carrying a burden of unsuccess. “I can sell you a rainproof cover for your hat.”

“How much?”

“Ninety-eight cents. A dollar-two with tax.”

I bought one. He put it on my hat. “It doesn’t do much for the appearance, but–”

“Beauty is functional.”

He smiled and nodded. “You took the words out of my mouth. I figured you were a smart man. My name’s Botkin, by the way, Joseph Botkin.”

“Lew Archer.”

We shook hands.

“My pleasure, Mr. Archer. If I’m not getting too personal, why would a man like you want to do your drinking at The Barroom Floor?”

“What’s the matter with The Barroom Floor?”

“I don’t like the way they handle their business, that’s all. It lowers the whole neighborhood. Which is low enough already, God knows.”

“How do they handle their business?”

“They let young kids hang out there, for one thing – I’m not saying they serve them liquor. But they shouldn’t let them in at all.”

“What do they do for another thing?”

“I’m talking too much.”

He squinted at me shrewdly. “And you ask a lot of questions. You wouldn’t be from the Board of Equalization by any chance?”

“No, but I probably wouldn’t tell you if I was. Is The Barroom Floor under investigation?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised. I heard there was a complaint put in on them.”

“From a man named Hillman?”

“Yeah. You are from the Board of Equalization, eh? If you want to look the place over for yourself, it opens at five.”

It was twenty past four. I wandered along the street, looking through the windows of pawnshops at the loot of wrecked lives.

The Barroom Floor was closed all right. It looked as if it was never going to reopen. Over the red-checked half-curtains at the windows, I peered into the dim interior. Red-checked tables and chairs were grouped around a dime-size dance floor; and farther back in the shadows was a bandstand decorated with gaudy paper. It looked so deserted you’d have thought all the members of the band had hocked their instruments and left town years ago.

I went back to my car and drove down Sanger Street to Ringo’s yard. It was surrounded by a high board fence on which his name was painted in six-foot white letters. I pushed in through the gate. A black German shepherd glided out of the open door of a shack and delicately grasped my right wrist between his large yellow teeth. He didn’t growl or anything. He merely held me, looking up brightly at my face.

A wide fat man, with a medicine ball of stomach badly concealed under his plaid shirt, came to the door of the shack.

“That’s all right, Lion.”

The dog let go of me and went to the fat man.

“His teeth are dirty,” I said. “You should give him bones to chew. I don’t mean wristbones.”

“Sorry. We weren’t expecting any customers. But he won’t hurt you, will you, Lion?”

Lion rolled his eyes and let his tongue hang out about a foot.

“Go ahead, pet him.”

“I’m a dog lover,” I said, “but is he a man lover?”

“Sure. Go ahead and pet him.”

I went ahead and petted him. Lion lay down on his back with his feet in the air, grinning up at me with his fangs.

“What can I do you for, mister?” Ringo said.

“I want to look at a car.”

He waved his hand toward the yard. “I got hundreds of them. But there isn’t a one of them you could drive away. You want one to cannibalize?”

“This is a particular car I want to examine.”

I produced my adjuster’s card. “It’s a fairly new Dodge, I think, belonged to a Mrs. Carlson, wrecked a week or so ago.”

“Yeah. I’ll show it to you.”

He put on a black rubber raincoat. Lion and I followed him down a narrow aisle between two lines of wrecked cars. With their crumpled grilles and hoods, shattered windshields, torn fenders, collapsed roofs, disemboweled seats, and blown-out tires, they made me think of some ultimate freeway disaster. Somebody with an eye for detail should make a study of automobile graveyards, I thought, the way they study the ruins and potsherds of vanished civilizations. It could provide a clue as to why our civilization is vanishing.

“All the ones in this line are totaled out,” Ringo said. “This is the Carlson job, second from the end. That Pontiac came in since. Head-on collision, two dead.”

He shuddered. “I never go on the highway when I can help it.”

“What caused the accident to the Carlson car?”

“It was taken for a joy ride by one of the neighbors’ kids, a boy name of Hillman. You know how these young squirts are – if it isn’t theirs, they don’t care what happens to it. According to the traffic detail, he missed a curve and went off the road and probably turned it over trying to get back on. He must of rolled over several times and ended up against a tree.”

I walked around the end of the line and looked over the Dart from all sides. There were deep dents in the roof and hood and all four fenders, as if it had been hit with random sledgehammers. The windshield was gone. The doors were sprung.

Leaning in through the left-hand door, I noticed an oval piece of white plastic, stamped with printing, protruding from the space between the driver’s seat and the back. I reached in and pulled it out. It was a brass door key. The printing on the plastic tab said: DACK’S AUTO COURT 7.

“Watch the glass in there,” Ringo said behind me. “What are you looking for?”

I put the key in my pocket before I turned around. “I can’t figure out why the boy didn’t get hurt.”

“He had the wheel to hang on to, remember. Lucky for him it didn’t break.”

“Is there any chance he wrecked the car on purpose?”

“Naw. He’d have to be off his rocker to do that. Course you can’t put anything past these kids nowadays. Can you, Lion?”

He stooped to touch the dog’s head and went on talking, either to it or to me. “My own son that I brought up in the business went off to college and now he don’t even come home for Christmas some years. I got nobody to take over the business.”

He straightened up and looked around at his wrecks with stern affection, like the emperor of a wasteland.

“Could there have been anybody with him in the car?”

“Naw. They would of been really banged up, with no seat belts and nothing to hang on to.”

He looked at the sky, and added impatiently: “I don’t mind standing around answering your questions, mister. But if you really want the dope on the accident, talk to the traffic detail. I’m closing up.”

It was ten minutes to five. I made my way back to The Barroom Floor. Somebody had turned on a few lights inside. The front door was still locked. I went back to my car and waited. I took out the Dack’s Auto Court key and looked at it, wondering if it meant anything. It could have meant, among other farfetched possibilities, that the handsome Mrs. Carlson was unfaithful to her husband.

Shortly after five a short dark man in a red jacket unlocked the front door of The Barroom Floor and took up his position behind the bar. I went in and sat down on a stool opposite him. He seemed much taller behind the bar. I looked over it and saw that he was standing on a wooden platform about a foot off the floor.

“Yeah,” he said “it keeps me on the level. Without it I can barely see over the bar.”

He grinned. “My wife, now, is five foot six and built in proportion. She ought to be here now,” he added in a disciplinary tone, and looked at the wristwatch on his miniature wrist. “What will you have?”

“Whisky sour. You own this place?”

“Me and the wife, we have an interest in it.”

“Nice place,” I said, though it wasn’t particularly nice. It was no cleaner and no more cheerful than the average bar and grill with cabaret pretensions. The old waiter leaning against the wall beside the kitchen door seemed to be sleeping on his feet.

“Thank you. We have plans for it.”

As he talked, he made my drink with expert fingers. “You haven’t been in before. I don’t remember your face.”

“I’m from Hollywood. I hear you have a pretty fair jazz combo.”

“Yeah.”

“Will they be playing tonight?”

“They only play Friday and Saturday nights. We don’t get the weekday trade to justify ’em.”

“What about the Sunday jam sessions? Are they still on?”

“Yeah. We had one yesterday. The boys were in great form. Too bad you missed them.”

He slid my drink across the bar. “You in the music business?”

“I represent musicians from time to time. I have an office on the Strip.”

“Sam would want to talk to you. He’s the leader.”

“Where can I get in touch with him?”

“I have his address somewhere. Just a minute, please.”

A couple of young men in business suits with rain-sprinkled shoulders had taken seats at the far end of the bar. They were talking in carrying voices about a million-dollar real-estate deal. Apparently it was somebody else’s deal, not theirs, but they seemed to enjoy talking about it.

The small man served them short whiskies without being asked. A lavishly built young woman came in and struggled out of a transparent raincoat, which she rolled up and tossed under the bar. She had a Sicilian nose. Her neck was hung with jewelry like a bandit princess’s.

The small man looked at her sternly. “You’re late. I can’t operate without a hostess.”

“I’m sorry, Tony. Rachel was late again.”

“Hire another baby sitter.”

“But she’s so good with the baby. You wouldn’t want just anybody feeding him.”

“We won’t talk about it now. You know where you’re supposed to be.”

“Yes, Mr. Napoleon.”

With a rebellious swing of the hip, she took up her post by the door. Customers were beginning to drift in by twos and fours. Most of them were young or young middle-aged. They looked respectable enough. Talking and laughing vivaciously, clinking her jewelry, the hostess guided them to the red-checked tables.

Her husband remembered me after a while. “Here’s Sam Jackman’s address. He has no phone, but it isn’t far from here.”

He handed me a sheet from a memo pad on which he had written in pencil: “169 Mimosa, apt. 2.”

It was near the railroad tracks, an old frame house with Victorian gingerbread on the facade half chewed away by time. The heavy carved front door was standing open, and I went into the hallway, feeling warped parquetry under my feet. On a closed door to my right, a number 2 stamped from metal hung upside down by a single nail. It rattled when I knocked.

A yellow-faced man in shirt sleeves looked out. “Who is it you want?”

“Sam Jackman.”

“That’s me.”

He seemed surprised that anybody should want him. “Is it about a job?”

He asked the question with a kind of hollow hopefulness that answered itself in the negative.

“No, but I want to talk to you about something important, Mr. Jackman.”

He caught the “mister” and inclined his head in acknowledgment. “All right.”

“May I come in? My name is Lew Archer. I’m a private detective.”

“I dunno, the place is a mess. With the wife working all day – but come on in.”

He backed into his apartment, as if he was afraid to expose his flank. It consisted of one large room, which might once have been the drawing room of the house. It still had its fine proportions, but the lofty ceiling was scabbed and watermarked, the windows hung with torn curtains. A cardboard wardrobe, a gas plate behind a screen, stood against the inner wall. Run-down furniture, including an unmade double bed in one corner, cluttered the bare wooden floor. On a table beside the bed, a small television set was reeling off the disasters of the day in crisp elocutionary sentences.

Jackman switched it off, picked up a smoking cigarette from the lid of a coffee can on the table, and sat on the edge of the bed. It wasn’t a marihuana cigarette. He was completely still and silent, waiting for me to explain myself. I sat down facing him.

“I’m looking for Tom Hillman.”

He gave me a swift glance that had fear in it, then busied himself putting out his cigarette. He dropped the butt into the pocket of his shirt.

“I didn’t know he was missing.”

“He is.”

“That’s too bad. What would make you think that he was here?” He looked around the room with wide unblinking eyes. “Did Mr. Hillman send you?”

“No.”

He didn’t believe me. “I just wondered. Mr. Hillman has been on my back.”

“Why?”

“I interested myself in his boy,” he said carefully.

“In what way?”

“Personally.”

He turned his hands palms upward on his knees. “I heard him doodling on the piano at the beach club. That was one day last spring. I did a little doodling of my own. Piano isn’t my instrument, but he got interested in some chords I showed him. That made me a bad influence.”

“Were you?”

“Mr. Hillman thought so. He got me fired from the beach club. He didn’t want his precious boy messing with the likes of me.”

His upturned hands lay like helpless pink-bellied animals on their backs. “If Mr. Hillman didn’t send you, who did?”

“A man named Dr. Sponti.”

I thought the name would mean nothing to him, but he gave me another of his quick fearful looks. “Sponti? You mean–?”

He fell silent.

“Go on, Mr. Jackman. Tell me what I mean.”

He huddled down into himself, like a man slumping into sudden old age. He let his speech deteriorate: “I wouldn’t know nothin’ about nothin’, mister.”

He opened his mouth in an idiotic smile that showed no teeth.

“I think you know a good deal. I think I’ll sit here until you tell me some of it.”

“That’s your privilege,” he said, although it wasn’t.

He took the butt out of his shirt pocket and lit it with a kitchen match. He dropped the distorted black match-end into the coffee lid. We looked at each other through smoke that drifted like ectoplasm from his mouth.

“You know Dr. Sponti, do you?”

“I’ve heard the name,” Jackman said.

“Have you seen Tom Hillman in the last two days?”

He shook his head, but his eyes stayed on my face in a certain way, as if he was expecting to be challenged.

“Where have you heard Sponti’s name?”

“A relative of mine. She used to work in the kitchen at LPS.” He said with irony: “That makes me an accessory, I guess.”

“Accessory to what?”

“Any crime in the book. I wouldn’t even have to know what happened, would I?” He doused his butt in a carefully restricted show of anger.

“That sort of talk gets us nowhere.”

“Where does your sort of talk get us? Anything I tell you is evidence against me, isn’t it?”

“You talk like a man with a record.”

“I’ve had my troubles.” He added after a long silence: “I’m sorry Tommy Hillman is having his.”

“You seem to be fond of him.”

“We took to each other.” He threw the line away.

“I wish you’d tell me more about him. That’s really what I came here for.”

My words sounded slightly false. I was suspicious of Jackman, and he knew it. He was a watcher and a subtle listener.

“Now I got a different idea,” he said. “I got the idea you’re after Tommy to put him back in the LP School. Correct me if I’m wrong.”

“You’re wrong.”

“I don’t believe you.”

He was watching my hands to see if I might hit him. There were marks on his face where he had been hit before. “No offense, but I don’t believe you, mister–”

I repeated my name. “Do you know where Tommy is?”

“No. I do know this. If Mr. Hillman put him in the LP School, he’s better off on the loose than going home. His father had no right to do it to him.”

“So I’ve been told.”

“Who told you?”

“One of the women on the staff there. She said Tom wasn’t disturbed in her opinion, and didn’t belong in the school. Tom seemed to agree with her. He broke out Saturday night.”

“Good.”

“Not so good. At least he was safe there.”

“He’s safe,” Jackman said, and quickly regretted saying it. He opened his mouth in its senseless toothless smile, a tragic mask pretending to be comic.

“Where is he then?”

Jackman shrugged his thin shoulders. “I told you before and I’ll tell you again, I don’t know.”

“How did you know that he was on the loose?”

“Sponti wouldn’t send you to me otherwise.”

“You’re quick on the uptake.”

“I have to pick up what I can,” he said. “You talk a lot without saying much.”

“You say even less. But you’ll talk, Sam.”

He rose in a quick jerky movement and went to the door. I thought he was going to tell me to leave, but he didn’t. He stood against the closed door in the attitude of a man facing a rifle squad.

“What do you expect me to do?” he cried. “Put my neck in the noose so Hillman can hang me?”

I walked toward him.

“Stay away from me!” The fear in his eyes was burning brightly, feeding on a long fuse of experience. He lifted one crooked arm to shield his head. “Don’t touch me!”

“Calm down. That’s hysterical talk, about a noose.”

“It’s a hysterical world. I lost my job for teaching his kid some music. Now Hillman is raising the ante. What’s the rap this time?”

“There is no rap if the boy is safe. You said he was. Didn’t you?”

No answer, but he looked at me under his arm. He had tears in his eyes.

“For God’s sake, Sam, we ought to be able to get together on this. You like the boy, you don’t want anything bad to happen to him. That’s all I have in mind.”

“There’s bad and bad.”

But he lowered his defensive arm and kept on studying my face.

“I know there’s bad and bad,” I said. “The line between them isn’t straight and narrow. The difference between them isn’t black and white. I know you favor Tom against his father. You don’t want him cut off from you or your kind of music. And you think I want to drag him back to a school where he doesn’t belong.”

“Aren’t you?”

“I’m trying to save his life. I think you can help me.”

“How?”

“Let’s sit down again and talk quietly the way we were. Come on. And stop seeing Hillman when you look at me.”

Jackman returned to the bed and I sat near him.

“Well, Sam, have you seen him in the last two days?”

“See who? Mr. Hillman?”

“Don’t go into the idiot act again. You’re an intelligent man. Just answer my question.”

“Before I do, will you answer one of mine?”

“If I possibly can.”

“When you say you’re trying to save his life, you mean save him from bad influences, don’t you, put him back in Squares-ville with all the other squares?”

“Worse things can happen to a boy.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“You could have asked a better one. I mean save him from death. He’s in the hands of people who may or may not decide to kill him, depending on how the impulse takes them. Am I telling you anything you don’t know?”

“You sure are, man.”

His voice was sincere, and his eyes filled up with compunction. But he and I could talk for a year, and he would still be holding something back. Among the things he was holding back was the fact that he didn’t believe me.

“Why don’t you believe me, Sam?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You don’t have to. You’re acting it out, by sitting on the information you have.”

“I ain’t sitting’ on nothin’, ’ceptin’ this here old raunchy bed,” he said in broad angry parody.

“Now I know you are. I’ve got an ear for certain things, the way you’ve got an ear for music. You play the trombone, don’t you?”

“Yeah.” He looked surprised.

“I hear you blow well.”

“Don’t flatter me. I ain’t no J. C. Higginbotham.”

“And I ain’t no Sherlock Holmes. But sooner or later you’re going to tell me when you saw Tommy Hillman last. You’re not going to sit on your raunchy old bed and wait for the television to inform you that they found Tommy’s body in a ditch.”

“Did they?”

“Not yet. It could happen tonight. When did you see him?”

He drew a deep breath. “Yesterday. He was okay.”

“Did he come here?”

“No sir. He never has. He stopped in at The Barroom Floor yesterday afternoon. He came in the back way and only stayed five minutes.”

“What was he wearing?”

“Slacks and a black sweater. He told me once his mother knitted that sweater for him.”

“Did you talk to him yesterday afternoon?”

“I played him a special riff and he came up and thanked me. That was all. I didn’t know he was on the run. Shucks, he even had his girl friend with him.”

“Stella?”

“The other one. The older one.”

“What’s her name?”

“He never told me. I only seen her once or twice before that. Tommy knew I wouldn’t approve of him squiring her around. She’s practically old enough to be his mother.”

“Can you describe her?”

“She’s a bottle blonde, with a lot of hair, you know how they’re wearing it now.”

He swept his hand up from his wrinkled forehead. “Blue eyes, with a lot of eye shadow. It’s hard to tell what she looks like under all that makeup.”

I got out my notebook and made some notes. “What’s her background?”

“Show business, maybe. Like I say, I never talked to her. But she has the looks.”

“I gather she’s attractive.”

“She appears to be to Tom. I guess she’s his first. A lot of young boys start out with an older woman. But,” he added under his breath, “he could do better than that.”

“How old is she?”

“Thirty, anyway. She didn’t show me her birth certificate. She dresses younger-skirts up over her knees. She isn’t a big girl, and maybe in some lights she can get away with the youth act.”

“What was she wearing yesterday?”

“A dark dress, blue satin or something like that, with sequins on it, a neckline down to here.”

He touched his solar plexus. “It grieved me to see Tom with his arm around her.”

“How did she seem to feel about him?”

“You’re asking me more than I can answer. He’s a good-looking boy, and she makes a show of affection. But I don’t need X-ray eyes to know what is in her mind.”

“Would she be a hustler?”

“Could be.”

“Did you ever see her with any other man?”

“I never did. I only saw her once or twice with Tom.”

“Once, or twice?”

He ruminated. “Twice before yesterday. The first time was two weeks ago yesterday. That was a Sunday, he brought her to our jam session that afternoon. The woman had been drinking and first she wanted to sing and then she wanted to dance. We don’t allow dancing at these sessions, you have to pay cabaret tax. Somebody told her that and she got mad and towed the boy away.”

“Who told her not to dance?”

“I disremember. One of the cats sitting around, I guess, they object to dancing. The music we play Sundays isn’t to dance to, anyway. It’s more to the glory of God,” he said surprisingly.

“What about the second time you saw her?”

He hesitated, thinking. “That was ten nights ago, on a Friday. They came in around midnight and had a sandwich. I drifted by their table, at the break, but Tom didn’t introduce me or ask me to sit down. Which was all right with me. They seemed to have things to talk about.”

“Did you overhear any part of their conversation?”

“I did.”

His face hardened. “She needed money, she was telling him, money to get away from her husband.”

“You’re sure you heard that?”

“Sure as I’m sitting here.”

“What was Tom’s attitude?”

“Looked to me like he was fascinated.”

“Had he been drinking?”

“She was. He didn’t drink. They don’t serve drinks to minors at the Floor. No sir. She had him hyped on something worse than drink.”

“Drugs?”

“You know what I mean.”

His hands molded a woman’s figure in the air.

“You used the word ‘hyped’.”

“It was just a manner of speaking,” he said nervously, rubbing his upper arm through the shirt sleeve.

“Are you on the needle?”

“No sir. I’m on the TV,” he said with a sudden downward smile.

“Show me your arms.”

“I don’t have to. You got no right.”

“I want to test your veracity. Okay?”

He unbuttoned his cuffs and pushed his sleeves up his thin yellow arms. The pitted scars in them were old and dry.

“I got out of Lexington seven years ago,” he said, “and I haven’t fallen since, I thank the good Lord.”

He touched his scars with a kind of reverence. They were like tiny extinct volcanoes in his flesh. He covered them up.

“You’re doing all right, Mr. Jackman. With your background, you’d probably know if Tom was on drugs.”

“I probably would. He wasn’t. More than once I lectured him on the subject. Musicians have their temptations. But he took my lectures to heart.”

He shifted his hand to the region of his heart. “I ought to of lectured him on the subject of women.”

“I never heard that it did much good. Did you ever see Tom and the blonde with anyone else?”

“No.”

“Did he introduce her to anyone?”

“I doubt it. He was keeping her to himself. Showing her off, but keeping her to himself.”

“You don’t have any idea what her name is?”

“No. I don’t.”

I got up and thanked him. “I’m sorry if I gave you a rough time.”

“I’ve had rougher.”