The Far Side of the Dollar (33 page)

“Yes. He was in a very mean mood. He told me to beat it before he killed me. I was intending to leave, anyway.”

“And nobody stopped you?”

“He wanted to get rid of me.”

“What about Sipe?”

“He was so drunk he hardly knew what he was doing. He passed out before I left.”

“What time did you leave?”

“A little after eight. It wasn’t dark yet. I caught a bus at the corner.”

“You weren’t there when Dick Leandro arrived?”

“No sir.” His eyes widened. “Was he at the hotel?”

“Evidently he was. Did Sipe or Harley ever mention him?”

“No sir.”

“Do you know what he might have been doing there?”

“No sir. I don’t know much about him. He’s
their
friend.” He shrugged one shoulder and arm toward the front of the house.

“Whose friend in particular? His or hers?”

“His. But she uses him, too.”

“To drive her places?”

“For anything she wants.” He spoke with the hurt ineffectual anger of a displaced son. “When he does something she wants, she says shell leave him money in her will. If he doesn’t, like when he has a date, she says shell cut him out. So usually he breaks the date.”

“Would he kill someone for her?”

Mrs. Perez had turned off the hot water. In the steamy silence at her end of the kitchen, she made an explosive noise that sounded like “Chuh!”

“I don’t know what he’d do,” Tom said deliberately. “He’s a yacht bum and they’re all the same, but they’re all different, too. It would depend on how much risk there was in it. And how much money.”

“Harley,” I said, “was stabbed with the knife your father gave you, the hunting knife with the striped handle.”

“I didn’t stab him.”

“Where did you last see the knife?”

He considered the question. “It was in my room, in the top drawer with the handkerchiefs and stuff.”

“Did Dick Leandro know where it was?”

“J never showed him. He never came to my room.”

“Did your mother—did Elaine Hillman know where it was?”

“I guess so. She’s always—she was always coming into my room, and checking on my things.”

“That’s true,” Mrs. Perez said.

I acknowledged her comment with a look which discouraged further comment.

“I understand on a certain Sunday morning she came into your room once too often. You threatened to shoot her with your father’s gun.”

Mrs. Perez made her explosive noise. Tom bit hard on the tip of his right thumb. His look was slanting, over my head and to one side, as if there was someone behind me.

“Is that the story they’re telling?” he said.

Mrs. Perez burst out: “It isn’t true. I heard her yelling up there. She came downstairs and got the gun out of the library desk and went upstairs with it.”

“Why didn’t you stop her?”

“I was afraid,” she said. “Anyway, Mr. Hillman was coming—I heard his car—and I went outside and told him there was trouble upstairs. What else could I do, with Perez away in Mexico?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Tom said. “Nothing happened. I took the gun away from her.”

“Did she try to shoot you?”

“She said she would if I didn’t take back what I said.”

“And what did you say?”

“That I’d rather live in an auto court with my real mother than in this house with her. She blew her top and ran downstairs and got the gun.”

“Why didn’t you tell your father about this?”

“He isn’t my father.”

I didn’t argue. It took more than genes to establish fatherhood. “Why didn’t you tell him, Tom?”

He made an impatient gesture with his hand. “What was the use? He wouldn’t have believed me. Anyway, I wa
s
mad at her, for lying to me about who I was. I did take the gun and point it at her head.”

“And want to kill her?”

He nodded. His head seemed very heavy on his neck. Mrs. Perez invented a sudden errand and bustled past him, pressing his shoulder with her hand as she went. As if to signalize this gesture, an electric bell rang over the pantry door.

“That’s the front door,” she said to nobody in particular.

I got there in a dead heat with Ralph Hillman. He let Dick Leandro in. The week’s accelerated aging process was working in Leandro now. Only his dark hair seemed lively. His face was drawn and slightly yellowish. He gave me a lackluster glance, and appealed to Hillman:

“Could I talk to you alone, Skipper? It’s important.” He was almost chattering.

Elaine spoke from the doorway of the sitting room: “It can’t be so important that you’d forget your manners. Come in and be sociable, Dick. I’ve been alone all evening, or so it seems.”

“We’ll join you later,” Hillman said.

“It’s very late already.” Her voice was edgy.

Leandro’s dim brown glance moved back and forth between them like a spectator’s at a tennis game on which he had bet everything he owned.

“If you’re not nice to me,” she said lightly, “I won’t be nice to you, Dick.”

“I do-don’t care about that.” There was strained defiance in his voice.

“You will.” Stiff-backed, she retreated into the sitting room.

I said to Leandro: “We won’t waste any more time. Did you do some driving for Mrs. Hillman last night?”

He turned away from me and almost leaned on Hillman, speaking in a hushed rapid voice. “I’ve
got
to talk to you alone. Something’s come up that you don’t know about.”

“We’ll go into the library,” Hillman said.

“If you do, I go along,” I said. “But we might as well talk here. I don’t want to get too far from Mrs. Hillman.”

The young man turned and looked at me in a different way, both lost and relieved. He knew I knew.

Hillman also knew, I thought. His proposal to Susanna tended to prove it; his confession that Tom was his natural son had provided me with evidence of motive. He leaned now on the wall beside the door, heavy and mysterious as a statue, with half-closed eyes.

I said to the younger man: “Did you drive her to the Barcelona Hotel, Dick?”

“Yessir.” With one shoulder high and his head on one side, he held himself in an awkward pose Which gave the effect of writhing. “I had no w-way of knowing what was on her mind. I
still
don’t know.”

“But you have a pretty good idea. Why all the secrecy?”

“She said I should borrow a car, that they had phoned for more money and Skipper wasn’t here so we would have to deliver it. Or else they’d kill him. We were to keep it secret from the police, and afterwards she said I must never tell anyone.”

“And you believed her story?”

“I c-certainly did.”

“When did you start to doubt it?”

“Well, I couldn’t figure out how she could get hold of all that c-cash.”

“How much?”

“Another twenty-five thousand, she said. She said it was in her bag—she was carrying her big knitting bag—but I didn’t actually see the money.”

“What did you see?”

“I didn’t actually
see
anything.” Like a stealthy animal that would eventually take over his entire forehead, his hair was creeping down toward his eyes. “I mean, I saw this character, the one she—I saw this character come out of the hotel and they went around to the back and I heard this scream.” He scratched the front of his throat.

“What did you do?”

“I stayed in the car. She told me to stay in the car. When she came back, she said it was an owl.”

“And you believed her?”

“I don’t know much about birds. Do I, Skipper?”

Elaine cried out very brightly from her doorway: “What under heaven are you men talking about?”

I walked toward her. “You. The owl you heard last night in the hotel garden. What kind of an owl was it?”

“A screech—” Her hand flew up and pressed against her lips.

“He looked human to me. He wasn’t a very good specimen, but he was human.”

She stopped breathing, and then gasped for breath. “He was a devil,” she said, “the scum of the earth.”

“Because he wanted more money?”

“It would have gone on and on. I had to stop him.” She stood shuddering in the doorway. With a fierce effort of will, she brought her emotions under control. “Speaking of money, I can take care of you. I’m sure the police would understand my position, but there’s no need to connect me with this—this—” She couldn’t think of a noun. “I can take care of you and I can take care of Dick.”

“How much are you offering?”

She looked at me imperiously, from the moral stilts of inherited wealth.

“Come into the sitting room,” she said, “and we’ll talk about it.”

The three of us followed her into the room and took up positions
around her chesterfield. Hillman looked at me curiously. He was very silent and subdued, but the calculator behind his eyes was still working. Dick Leandro was coming back to life. His eyes had brightened. Perhaps he still imagined that somehow, somewhere, sometime, there would be Hillman money coming to him.

“How much?” I said to her.

“Twenty-five thousand.”

“That’s better than a knife between the ribs. Does that mean twenty-five thousand overall or twenty-five thousand for each murder?”

“Each murder?”

“There were two, done with the same knife, almost certainly by the same person. You.”

She moved her head away from my pointing finger, like a stage-shy girl. A stage-shy girl playing the role of an aging woman with monkey wrinkles and fading fine blonde hair.

“Fifty thousand then,” she said.

“He’s playing with you,” Hillman said. “You can’t buy him.”

She turned toward him. “My late father once said that you can buy anyone, anyone at all. I proved that when I bought you.” She made a gesture of repugnance. “I wish I hadn’t. You turned out to be a bad bargain.”

“You didn’t buy me. You merely leased my services.”

They faced each other as implacably as two skulls. She said:

“Did you have to palm her bastard off on me?”

“I wanted a son. I didn’t plan it. It happened.”

“You made it happen. You connived to bring her baby into my house. You let me feed and nurture him and call him mine. How could you be such a living falsity?”

“Don’t talk to me about falsity, Elaine. It seemed the best way to handle the problem.”

“Stallion,” she said. “Filth.”

I heard a faint movement in the adjoining room. Straining my eyes into the darkness, I could see Tom sitting on the bench in front of the grand piano. I was tempted to shut the door, but it was too late, really. He might as well hear it all.

Hillman said in a surprisingly calm voice: “I never could
understand the Puritan mind, Ellie. You think a little fun in bed is the ultimate sin, worse than murder. Christ, I remember our wedding night. You’d have thought I was murdering you.”

“I wish you had.”

“I almost wish I had. You murdered Carol, didn’t you, Ellie?”

“Of course I did. She phoned here Monday morning, after you left. Tom had given her his telephone number. I took the call in his room, and she spilled out everything. She
said
she had just caught on to her husband’s plans, and she was afraid he would harm Tom, who wasn’t really his son. I’m sure it was just an excuse she used to get her knife into me.”

“Her knife?” I said.

“That was a badly chosen image, wasn’t it? I mean that she was glorying over me, annulling the whole meaning of my existence.”

“I think she was simply trying to save her son.”

“Her son, not mine. Her son and Ralph’s. That was the point, don’t you see? I felt as if she had killed me. I was just a fading ghost in the world, with only enough life left to strike back. Walking from where I left the Cadillac, I could feel the rain fall through me. I was no solider than the rain.

“Apparently her husband had caught her phoning me. He took her back to their cottage and beat her and left her unconscious on the floor. She was easy for me to kill. The knife slipped in and out. I hadn’t realized how easy it would be.

“But the second time wasn’t easy,” she said. “The knife caught in his ribs. I couldn’t pull it out of him.”

Her voice was high and childish in complaint. The little girl behind her wrinkles had been caught in a malign world where even things no longer cooperated and even men could not be bought.

“Why did you have to stick it into him?” I said.

“He suspected that I killed Carol. He used Tom’s number to call me and accuse me. Of course he wanted
money.”
She spoke as if her possession of money had given her a special contemptuous insight into other people’s hunger for it. “It would have gone on and on.”

It was going on and on. Tom came blinking out of the darkness.
He looked around in pity and confusion. Elaine turned her face away from him, as if she had an unprepossessing disease.

The boy said to Hillman: “Why didn’t you tell me? It could have made a difference.”

“It still can,” Hillman said with a hopefulness more grinding than despair. “Son?”

He moved toward Tom, who evaded his outstretched hands and left the room. Walking rather unsteadily, Hillman followed him. I could hear them mounting the stairs, on different levels, out of step.

Dick Leandro got up from his place, rather tentatively, as if he had been liberated from an obscure bondage. He went into the alcove, where I heard him making himself a drink.

Elaine Hillman was still thinking about money. “What about it, Mr. Archer? Can you be bought?” Her voice was quite calm. The engines of her anger had run down.

“I can’t be bought with anything you’ve offered.”

“Will you have mercy on me, then?”

“I don’t have that much mercy.”

“I’m not asking for a great deal. Just let me sleep one more night in my own house.”

“What good would that do you?”

“This good. I’ll be frank with you. I’ve been saving sleeping pills for a considerable time—”

“How long?”

“Nearly a year, actually. I’ve been in despair for at least that long—”

“You should have taken your pills sooner.”

“Before all this, you mean?” She waved her hand at the empty room as if it was a tragic stage littered with corpses.

“Before all this,” I said.