The Far Side of the Dollar (27 page)

“Spare me the warmed-over sentiment. This is for real.”

“You needn’t sound so insulting.”

“I apologize. Now let’s have it.”

“Well, he knew you had seen me, and he said we had to keep our stories straight. It seems there was a discrepancy in the story he told you. He told you he hadn’t met Carol, but actually he had. After Mike Harley was arrested, she made an appeal to him and he did what he could. I wasn’t to tell you about his interest in Carol.”

“He was interested in Carol?”

“Not in the way you mean,” she said with a lift of her head. “I was his girl. He simply didn’t like the idea of leaving a child bride like Carol alone in the Barcelona Hotel. He asked me to take her under my wing. My slightly broken wing. Which I did, as you know.”

“It all sounds very innocent.”

“It was. I swear it. Besides, I liked Carol. I loved her, that summer in Burbank. I felt as if the baby in her womb belonged to both of us.”

“Have you ever had a child?”

She shook her head rather sadly. “I never will have now. I was sure I was pregnant once, that very spring we’ve been
talking about, but the doctor said it was false, caused by wishful thinking.”

“Was Carol seeing a doctor when she lived with you?”

“Yes, I made her go. She went to the same doctor, actually. Weintraub, his name was.”

“Did he deliver her baby?”

“I wouldn’t know. She’d already left me, remember, and gone off with Mike Harley. And I didn’t go back to Dr. Weintraub on account of the unpleasant associations.”

“Was he unpleasant to you?”

“I mean the association with Ralph Hillman. Ralph sent me to Dr. Weintraub. I think they were buddies in the Navy.”

Dr. Weintraub’s plump face came into my mind. At the same time I remembered where I had seen a younger version of it, stripped of excess flesh, that very day. Weintraub was a member of the group on the flight deck, in the picture hanging on Hillman’s library wall.

“It’s funny,” Susanna was saying, “how a name you haven’t heard for seventeen or eighteen years will crop up, and then a couple of hours or a couple of days later, it will crop up again. Like Weintraub.”

“Has the name been cropping up in other contexts?”

“Just this afternoon at the office. I had a rather peculiar caller whom I meant to tell you about, but all these other matters pushed him out of my mind. He was interested in Dr. Weintraub, too.”

“Who was he?”

“He didn’t want to say. When I pressed him, he said his name was Jackman.”

“Sam Jackman?”

“He didn’t mention his first name.”

“Sam Jackman is a middle-aged Negro with very light skin who looks and talks like a jazz musician on his uppers, which he is.”

“This boy seemed to be on his uppers, all right, but he certainly isn’t Sam. Maybe he’s Sam’s son. He can’t be more than eighteen or nineteen.”

“Describe him.”

“Thin-faced, very good features, very intense dark eyes, so intense he scared me a little. He seemed intelligent, but he was too excited to make much sense.”

“What was he excited about?” I said with a mounting excitement of my own.

“Carol’s death, I think. He didn’t refer to it directly, but he asked me if I had known Carol in 1945. Apparently he’d been all the way out to Burbank trying to find me. He came across an old secretary at Warner’s whom I still keep in touch with, and used her name to get past my secretary. He wanted to know what I could tell him about the Harley baby, and when I couldn’t tell him anything he asked me what doctor Carol had gone to. I dredged up Weintraub’s name—Elijah Weintraub isn’t exactly a forgettable name—and it satisfied him. I was quite relieved to get rid of him.”

“I’m sorry you did.”

She looked at me curiously. “Do you suppose he could be the Harley baby himself?”

I didn’t answer her. I got out my collection of photographs and shuffled them. There was an electric tremor in my hands, as if time was short-circuiting through me.

Susanna whispered fearfully: “He isn’t dead, is he, Lew? I couldn’t bear to look at another dead picture.”

“He’s alive. At least, I hope he is.”

I showed her Tom Hillman’s face. She said: “That’s the boy I talked to. But he’s very much the worse for wear now.
Is
he the Harley baby?”

“I think so. He’s also the baby that Ralph and Elaine Hillman adopted through Dr. Weintraub. Did you get the impression that he was on his way to see Weintraub?”

“Yes. I did.” She was getting excited, too. “It’s like an ancient identity myth. He’s searching for his lost parentage.”

“The hell of it is, both of his parents are dead. What time did you see him?”

“Around four o’clock.”

It was nearly six now. I went to the phone and called Weintraub’s office. His answering service said it was dosed for the night. The switchboard girl wouldn’t give me Weintraub’s home address or his unlisted number, and neither would the manager
of the answering service. I had to settle for leaving my name and Susanna’s number and waiting for Weintraub to call me, if he was willing.

An hour went by. Susanna broiled me a steak, and chewed unhungrily on a piece of it. We sat at a marble table in the patio and she told me all about identity myths and how they grew. Oedipus. Hamlet. Stephen Dedalus. Her father had taught courses in such subjects. It passed the time, but it didn’t relieve my anxiety for the boy. Hamlet came to a bloody end. Oedipus killed his father and married his mother, and then blinded himself.

“Thomas Harley,” I said aloud. “Thomas Harley Hillman Jackman. He knew he wasn’t the Hillmans’ son. He thought he was a changeling.”

“You get that in the myths, too.”

“I’m talking about real life. He turned on his foster parents and went for his real parents. It’s too bloody bad they had to be the Harleys.”

“You’re very certain that he is the Harley child.”

“It fits in with everything I know about him. Incidentally, it explains why Ralph Hillman tried to hush up the fact that he’d taken an interest in Carol. He didn’t want the facts of the adoption to come out.”

“Why, though?”

“He’s kept it a secret all these years, even from Tom. He seems to be a little crazy on the subject.”

“I got that impression this morning.” She leaned across the corner of the table and touched my fingers. “Lew? You don’t think he went off his rocker and murdered Carol himself?”

“It’s a possibility, but a remote one. What was on his mind at breakfast?”

“Him, mostly. He felt his life was collapsing around his ears. He thought I might be interested in helping him to pick up the pieces. After eighteen years he was offering me my second big break.” Her scorn touched herself as well as Hillman.

“I don’t quite understand.”

“He asked me to marry him, Lew. I suppose that’s in line with contemporary
mores
. You get your future set up ahead of time, before you terminate your present marriage.”

“I don’t like that word ‘terminate.’ Did he say what he intended to do with Elaine?”

“No.” She looked quite pale and haunted.

“I hope divorce was all he had in mind. What was your answer?”

“My answer?”

“Your response to his proposal.”

“Oh. I told him I was waiting for a better offer.”

Her dark meaningful eyes were on my face. I sat there trying to frame a balanced answer. The telephone rang inside before I had a chance to deliver it.

I went in through the door we had left open and picked up the receiver. “Archer speaking.”

“This is Dr. Weintraub.” His voice had lost its calmness. “I’ve just had a thoroughly upsetting experience—”

“Have you seen the Hillman boy?”

“Yes. He came to me just as I was leaving. He asked me essentially the same question you did.”

“What did you tell him, Doctor?”

“I told him the truth. He already knew it, anyway. He wanted to know if Mike and Carol Harley were his parents. They were.”

“How did he react to the information?”

“Violently, I’m afraid. He hit me and broke my glasses. I’m practically blind without them. He got away from me.”

“Have you told the police?”

“No.”

“Tell them, now. And tell them who he is.”

“But his father—his adoptive father wouldn’t want me—”

“I know how it is when you’re dealing with an old commander, Doctor. He was your commander at one time, wasn’t he?”

“Yes. I was his flight surgeon.”

“You aren’t any more, and you can’t let Hillman do your thinking for you. Do you tell the police, or do I?”

“I will. I realize we can’t let the boy run loose in his condition.”

“Just what is his condition?”

“He’s very upset and, as I said, violently acting out.”

With his heredity, I thought, that was hardly surprising.

I
KISSED
S
USANNA GOODBYE
and drove down Wilshire through Westwood. I wanted to be at the Santa Monica bus station at nine, just in case Tom showed up, but there was still time for another crack at Ben Daly. I turned down San Vicente toward the coastal highway.

The sun was half down on the horizon, bleeding color into the sea and the sky. Even the front of the Barcelona Hotel was touched with factitious Mediterranean pink. The crowd of onlookers in the driveway had changed and dwindled. There were still a few waiting for something more interesting than their lives to happen.

It was a warm night, and most of them were in beach costume. One man was dressed formally in a dark gray business suit and dark gray felt hat. He looked familiar.

I pulled up the drive on impulse and got out. The man in the dark gray suit was Harold Harley. He was wearing a black tie, which Lila had doubtless chosen for him, and a woebegone expression.

It deepened when he saw me. “Mr. Archer?”

“You can’t have forgotten me, Harold.”

“No. It’s just that everything looks different, even people’s faces. Or that hotel there. It’s just a caved-in old dump, and I used to think it was a pretty ritzy place. Even the sky looks different.” He raised his eyes to the red-streaked sky. “It looks hand-tinted, phony, like there was nothing behind it.”

The little man talked like an artist. He might have become one, I thought, with a different childhood.

“I didn’t realize you were so fond of your brother.”

“Neither did I. But it isn’t just that. I hate California. Nothing really good ever happened to me here in California. Or Mike either. “He gestured vaguely toward the cluster of official cars. “I wisht I was back in Idaho.”

I drew him away from the little group of onlookers, from the
women in slacks and halters which their flesh overflowed, the younger girls with haystacks of hair slipping down their foreheads into their blue-shadowed eyes, the tanned alert-looking boys with bleached heads and bleached futures. We stood under a magnolia tree that needed water.

“What happened to your brother started in Idaho, Harold.” And also what happened to you, or failed to happen.

“You think I don’t know that? The old man always said Mike would die on the gallows. Anyway, he cheated the gallows.”

“I talked to your father yesterday.”

Harold started violently, and glanced behind him. “Is he in town?”

“I was in Pocatello yesterday.”

He looked both relieved and anxious. “How is he?”

“Much the same, I gather. You didn’t tell me he was one step ahead of the butterfly nets.”

“You didn’t ask me. Anyway, he isn’t like that all the time.”

“But he had to be committed more than once.”

“Yeah.” He hung his head. In the final glare of day I could see the old closet dust in the groove of his hat, and the new sweat staining the hatband.

“It’s nothing to blame yourself for,” I said. “It explains a lot about Mike.”

“I know. The old man was a terror when Mike was a kid. Maw finally had him committed for what he did to Mike and her. Mike left home and never came back, and who could blame him?”

“But you stayed.”

“For a while. I had a trick of pretending I was some place else, like here in California. I finally came out here and went to photography school.”

I returned to the question that interested me. It was really a series of questions about the interlinked lives that brought Mike Harley and Carol Brown from their beginnings in Idaho to their ends in California. Their beginnings and ends had become clear enough. The middle still puzzled me, as well as the ultimate end that lay ahead in darkness.

“I talked to Carol’s parents, too,” I said. “Carol was there
earlier in the summer, and she left a suitcase in her room. A letter in it explained to me why you blamed yourself for the Hillman extortion.”

“You saw my letter, eh? I should never have written a letter like that to Mike. I should have known better.” He was hanging his head again.

“It’s hard to see ahead and figure what the little things we do will lead to. And you weren’t intending to suggest anything wrong.”

“Gosh, no.”

“Anyway, your letter helped me. It led me back here to Otto Sipe, and I hope eventually to the Hillman boy. The boy was holed up here with Sipe from Monday morning till Wednesday night, last night.”

“No kidding.”

“How well did you know Otto Sipe?”

Harold winced away from the question. If he could, he would have disappeared entirely, leaving his dark business suit and black tie and dusty hat suspended between the crisp brown grass and the dry leaves of the magnolia. He said in a voice that didn’t want to be heard:

“He was Mike’s friend. I got to know him that way. He trained Mike for a boxing career.”

“What kind of a career did he train you for, Harold?”

“Me?”

“You. Didn’t Sipe get you the job as hotel photographer here?”

“On account of—I was Mike’s brother.”

“I’m sure that had something to do with it. But didn’t Sipe want you to help him with his sideline?”

“What sideline was that?”

“Blackmail.”

He shook his head so vehemently that his hat almost fell off. “I never had any part of the rake-off, honest. He paid me standard rates to take those pictures, a measly buck a throw, and if I didn’t do it I’d lose my job. I quit anyway, as soon as I had the chance. It was a dirty business.” He peered up the driveway at the bland decaying face of the hotel. It was stark white now in
the twilight. “I never took any benefit from it. I never even knew who the people were.”