The Far Side of the Dollar (12 page)

I installed myself in one of the booths and placed a long-distance call to Arnie Walters, a Reno detective who often worked with me. I had no Idaho contact, and Reno was on the fastest route to Idaho. Reno itself had a powerful attraction for thieves with sudden money.

“Walters Agency,” Arnie said.

“This is Lew.” I told him where I was calling from, and why.

“You come up with some dillies. Murder and kidnapping, eh?”

“The kidnapping may be a phony. Tom Hillman, the supposed victim, has been palling around with the murdered woman for a couple of weeks.”

“How old did you say he was?”

“Seventeen. He’s big for his age.” I described Tom Hillman in detail. “He may be traveling with Brown either voluntarily or involuntarily.”

“Or not traveling at all?” Arnie said.

“Or not traveling at all.”

“You know this boy?”

“No.”

“I thought maybe you knew him. Okay. Where does this photographer Harold Harley come in?”

“Harley may be Brown himself, or he may know Brown. His card is the only real lead I have so far. That and the Idaho license. I want you to do two things. Check Idaho and adjoining states for Harley. You have the business directories, don’t you?”

“Yeah, I’ll get Phyllis on them.” She was his wife and partner.

“The other thing, I want you to look out for Brown and the boy, you and your informers in Tahoe and Vegas.”

“What makes you think they’re headed in this direction?”

“It’s a hunch. The woman had a silver dollar and a loaded dice in her purse.”

“And no identification?”

“Whoever did her in got rid of everything she had in that line. But we’ll identify her. We have
her.”

“Let me know when you do.”

I walked across town to the courthouse, under a sky that yesterday’s rain had washed clean. I asked the deputy on duty in the sheriff’s department where to find Lieutenant Bastian. He directed me to the identification laboratory on the second floor.

It was more office than laboratory, a spacious room with pigeons murmuring on the window ledges. The walls were crowded with filing cabinets and hung with maps of the city and county and state. A large adjacent closet was fitted out as a darkroom, with drying racks and a long metal sink.

Bastian got up smiling. His smile wasn’t greatly different from last night’s frown. He laid down a rectangular magnifying glass on top of the photograph he had been studying. Leaning across the desk to take his outstretched hand, I could see that it was a picture of Mrs. Brown in death.

“What killed her, Lieutenant?” I said when we were seated.

“This.” He held up his right hand and clenched it. His face clenched with it. “The human hand.”

“Robert Brown’s?”

“It looks like it. He gave her a beating early yesterday afternoon, according to Stanislaus. The deputy coroner says she’s been dead that long.”

“Stanislaus told me they quarreled over a telephone call she made.”

“That’s right. We haven’t been able to trace the call, which means it was probably local. She used the phone in Stanislaus’s office, but he claims to know nothing more about it.”

“How does he know Brown gave her a beating?” I said.

“He says a neighbor woman told him. That checks out.” Bastian wiped his left hand across his tense angry face, without really changing his expression. “It’s terrible the way some people live, that a woman could be killed within a neighbor’s hearing and nobody knows or cares.”

“Not even Brown,” I said. “He thought she was alive at nine-thirty last night. He talked to her through the door, trying to get
her to open up. Or he may have been trying to con himself into thinking he hadn’t killed her after all. I don’t think he’s too stable.”

Bastian looked up sharply. “Were you in the cottage when Brown was talking through the door?”

“I was. Incidentally, I recognized his voice. He’s the same man who extorted twenty-five thousand dollars from Ralph Hillman last night. I listened in on a phone call he made to Hillman yesterday.”

Bastian’s right fist was still clenched. He used it to strike the desk top, savagely. The pigeons on the window ledge flew away.

“It’s too damn bad,” he said, “you didn’t bring us in on this yesterday. You might have saved a life, not to mention twenty-five thousand dollars.”

“Tell that to Hillman.”

“I intend to. This morning. Right now I’m telling you.”

“The decision wasn’t mine. I tried to change it. Anyway, I entered the case after the woman was killed.”

“That’s a good place to begin,” Bastian said after a pause. “Go on from there. I want the full record.”

He reached down beside his desk and turned on a recorder. For an hour or more the tape slithered quietly from wheel to wheel as I talked into it. I was clientless and free and I didn’t suppress anything. Not even the possibility that Tom Hillman had cooperated with Brown in extorting money from his father.

“I’d almost like to think that that was true,” Bastian said. “It would mean that the kid is still alive, anyway. But it isn’t likely.”

“Which isn’t likely?”

“Both things. I doubt that he hoaxed his old man, and I doubt that he’s still alive. It looks as if the woman was used as a decoy to get him in position for the kill. We’ll probably find his body in the ocean week after next.”

His words had the weight of experience behind them. Kidnap victims were poor actuarial risks. But I said:

“I’m working on the assumption that he’s alive.”

Bastian raised his eyebrows. “I thought Dr. Sponti took you off the case.”

“I still have some of his money.”

Bastian gave me a long cool appraising look. “L. A. was right. You’re not the usual peeper.”

“I hope not.”

“If you’re staying with it, you can do something for me, as well as for yourself. Help me to get this woman identified.” He slid the picture of Mrs. Brown out from under the magnifying glass. “This postmortem photo is too rough to circularize. But you could show it around in the right circles. I’m having a police artist make a composite portrait, but that takes time.”

“What about fingerprints?”

“We’re trying that, too, but a lot of women have never been fingerprinted. Meantime, will you try and get an identification? You’re a Hollywood man, and the woman claimed that she was in pictures at one time.”

“That doesn’t mean a thing.”

“It might.”

“But I was planning to try and pick up Brown’s trail in Nevada. If the boy’s alive, Brown knows where to find him.”

“The Nevada police already have our APB on Brown. And you have a private operative on the spot. Frankly, I’d appreciate it if you’ll take this picture to Hollywood with you. I don’t have a man I can spare. By the way, I had your car brought into the county garage.”

Cooperation breeds cooperation. Besides, the woman’s identity was important, if only because the killer had tried to hide it. I accepted the picture, along with several others taken from various angles, and put them in the same pocket as my picture of Tom.

“You can reverse any telephone charges,” Bastian said in farewell.

Halfway down the stairs I ran into Ralph Hillman. At first glance he looked fresher than he had the previous evening. But it was an illusory freshness. The color in his cheeks was hectic, and the sparkle in his eyes was the glint of desperation. He sort of reared back when he saw me, like a spooked horse.

“Can you give me a minute, Mr. Hillman?”

“Sorry. I have an appointment.”

“The lieutenant can wait I want to say this. I admit I made a
mistake last night. But you made a mistake in getting Sponti to drop me.”

He looked at me down his patrician nose.
“You’d
naturally think so. It’s costing you money.”

“Look, I’m sorry about last night. I was overeager. That’s the defect of a virtue. I want to carry on with the search for your son.”

“What’s the use? He’s probably dead. Thanks to you.”

“That’s a fairly massive accusation, Mr. Hillman.”

“Take it. It’s yours. And please get out of my way.” He looked compulsively at his wristwatch. “I’m already late.”

He brushed past me and ran upstairs as if I might pursue him. It wasn’t a pleasant interview. The unpleasantness stuck in my crop all the way to Los Angeles.

I
BOUGHT A HAT
a size too large, to accommodate my bandages, and paid a brief visit to the Hollywood division of the L. A. P. D. None of the detective-sergeants in the upstairs offices recognized Mrs. Brown in her deathly disguise. I went from the station to the news room of the Hollywood
Reporter
. Most of the people at work there resented being shown such pictures. The ones who gave them an honest examination failed to identify Mrs. Brown.

I tried a number of flesh peddlers along the Strip, with the same lack of success and the same effect. The photographs made me unpopular. These guys and dolls pursuing the rapid buck hated to be reminded of what was waiting on the far side of the last dollar. The violence of the woman’s death only made it worse. It could happen to anybody, any time.

I started back to my office. I intended to call Bastian and ask him to rush me a Xerox copy of the composite sketch as soon as his artist had completed it. Then I thought of Joey Sylvester.

Joey was an old agent who maintained an office of sorts two blocks off Sunset and two flights up. He hadn’t been able to adapt to the shift of economic power from the major studios to the independent producers. He lived mainly on his share of residuals from old television movies, and on his memories.

I knocked on the door of his cubbyhole and heard him hiding his bottle, as if I might be the ghost of Louis B. Mayer or an emissary from J. Arthur Rank. Joey looked a little disappointed when he opened the door and it was only me. But he resurrected the bottle and offered me a drink in a paper cup. He had a glass tumbler for his own use, and I happened to know that nearly every day he sat at his desk and absorbed a quart of bourbon and sometimes a quart and a half.

He was a baby-faced old man with innocent white hair and crafty eyes. His mind was like an old-fashioned lamp with its wick in alcohol, focused so as to light up the past and its chauffeur-driven Packard, and cast the third-floor-walkup present into cool shadow.

It wasn’t long past noon, and Joey was still in fair shape. “It’s good to see you, Lew boy. I drink to your health.” He did so, with one fatherly hand on my shoulder.

“I drink to yours.”

The hand on my shoulder reached up and took my hat off. “What did you do to your head?”

“I was slightly shot last night.”

“You mean you got drunk and fell down?”

“Shot with a gun,” I said.

He clucked. “You shouldn’t expose yourself the way you do. Know what you ought to do, Lew boy? Retire and write your memoirs. The unvarnished sensational truth about Hollywood.”

“It’s been done a thousand times, Joey. Now they’re even doing it in the fan mags.”

“Not the way you could do it. Give ’em the worm’s-eye view. There’s a title!” He snapped his fingers. “I bet I could sell your story for twenty-five G’s, make it part of a package with Steve McQueen. Give some thought to it, Lew boy. I could open up a lovely jar of olives for you.”

“I just opened a can of peas, Joey, and I wonder if you can
help me with it. How is your tolerance for pictures of dead people?”

“I’ve seen a lot of them die.” His free hand fluttered toward the wall above his desk. It was papered with inscribed photographs of vanished players. His other hand raised his tumbler. “I drink to them.”

I cluttered his desk top with the angry pictures. He looked them over mournfully. “Ach!” he said. “What the human animal does to itself! Am I supposed to know her?”

“She’s supposed to have worked in pictures. You know more actors than anybody.”

“I did at one time. No more.”

“I doubt that she’s done any acting recently. She was on the skids.”

“It can happen overnight.” In a sense, it had happened to him. He put on his glasses, turned on a desk lamp, and studied the pictures intensively. After a while he said: “Carol?”

“You know her.”

He looked at me over his glasses. “I couldn’t swear to it in court. I once knew a little blonde girl, natural blonde, with ears like that. Notice that they’re small and close to the head and rather pointed. Unusual ears for a girl.”

“Carol who?”

“I can’t remember. It was a long time ago, back in the forties. I don’t think she was using her own name, anyway.”

“Why not?”

“She had a very stuffy family back in Podunk. They disapproved of the acting bit. I seem to remember she told me she ran away from home.”

“In Podunk?”

“I didn’t mean that literally. Matter of fact, I think she came from some place in Idaho.”

“Say that again.”

“Idaho. Is your dead lady from Idaho?”

“Her husband drives a car with an Idaho license. Tell me more about Carol. When and where did you know her?”

“Right here in Hollywood. A friend of mine took an interest in the girl and brought her to me. She was a lovely child. Untouched.”
His hands flew apart in the air, untouching her. “All she had was high-school acting experience, but I got her a little work. It wasn’t hard in those days, with the war still going on. And I had a personal in with all the casting directors on all the lots.”

“What year was it, Joey?”

He took off his glasses and squinted into the past. “She came to me in the spring of ’45, the last year of the war.”

Mrs. Brown, if she was Carol, had been around longer than I’d thought. “How old was she then?”

“Very young. Just a child, like I said. Maybe sixteen.”

“And who was the friend who took an interest in her?”

“It isn’t like you think. It was a woman, one of the girls in the story department at Warner’s. She’s producing a series now at Television City. But she was just a script girl back in the days I’m talking about.”

“You wouldn’t be talking about Susanna Drew?”

“Yeah. Do you know Susanna?”

“Thanks to you. I met her at a party at your house, when you were living in Beverly Hills.”