The Far Side of the Dollar (21 page)

She shook her head.

“Then will you help me get him?”

“It’s why I came here, really. I couldn’t sic the police on him. But you’re different.” She touched the back of my hand. “You won’t let them put him back in Laguna Perdida.”

“It won’t happen if I can possibly help it. I think I can. If Tom needs treatment, he should be able to get it as an outpatient.”

“He isn’t sick!”

“His father must have had a reason for putting him there. Something happened that Sunday, he wouldn’t tell me what.”

“It happened long before that Sunday,” she said. “His father turned against him, that’s what happened. Tommy isn’t the hairy-chested type, and he preferred music to trapshooting and sailing and such things. So his father turned against him. It’s as simple as that.”

“Nothing ever is, but we won’t argue. If you’ll excuse me for a minute, Stella, I have to make a phone call.”

The phone was on the desk under the window. I sat down there and dialed Susanna Drew’s unlisted number. She answered on the first ring:

“Hello.”

“Lew Archer. You sound very alert for three o’clock in the morning.”

“I’ve been lying awake thinking, about you among other things and people. Somebody said—I think it was Scott Fitzgerald—something to the effect that in the real dark night of the soul it’s always three o’clock in the morning. I have a reverse twist on that. At three o’clock in the morning it’s always the real dark night of the soul.”

“The thought of me depresses you?”

“In certain contexts it does. In others, not.”

“You’re talking in riddles, Sphinx.”

“I mean to be, Oedipus. But you’re not the source of my depression. That goes back a long way.”

“Do you want to tell me about it?”

“Another time, Doctor.” Her footwork was very skittish. “You didn’t call me at this hour for snatches of autobiography.”

“No, though I’d still like to know who that telephone call was from the other day.”

“And that’s why you called me?” There was disappointment in her voice, ready to turn into anger.

“It isn’t why I called you. I need your help.”

“Really?” She sounded surprised, and rather pleased. But she said guardedly: “You mean by telling you all I know and like that?”

“We don’t have time. I think this case is breaking. Anyway I have to make a move, now. A very nice high-school girl named Stella has turned up on my doorstep.” I was speaking to the girl in the room as well as to the woman on the line; as I did so, I realized that they were rapidly becoming my favorite girl and woman. “I need a safe place to keep her for the rest of the night.”

“I’m not that safe.” A rough note in her voice suggested that she meant it.

Stella said quickly behind me: “I could stay here.”

“She can’t stay here. Her parents would probably try to hang a child-stealing rap on me.”

“Are you serious?”

“The situation is serious, yes.”

“All right. Where do you live?”

“Stella and I will come there. We’re less than half an hour from you at this time of night.”

Stella said when I hung up: “You didn’t have to do it behind my back.”

“I did it right in front of your face. And I don’t have time to argue.”

To underline the urgency I took off my jacket, got my gun and its harness out of the drawer, and put it on in front of her. She watched me with wide eyes. The ugly ritual didn’t quite silence her.

“But I didn’t want to
meet
anybody tonight.”

“You’ll like Susanna Drew. She’s very stylish and hep.”

“But I never
do
like people when adults tell me I will.”

After the big effort of the night, she was relapsing into childishness. I said, to buck her up:

“Forget your war with the adults. You’re going to be an adult pretty soon yourself. Then who will you have to blame for everything?”

“That isn’t fair.”

It wasn’t, but it held her all the way to the apartment house on Beverly Glen. Susanna came to the door in silk pajamas, not the kind anyone slept in. Her hair was brushed. She hadn’t bothered with makeup. Her face was extraordinarily and nakedly handsome, with eyes as real and dark as any night.

“Come in, Lew. It’s nice to see you, Stella. I’m Susanna. I have a bed made up for you upstairs.” She indicated the indoor balcony which hung halfway up the wall of the big central studio, and on which an upstairs room opened. “Do you want something to eat?”

“No, thank you,” Stella said. “I had a hamburger at the bus station.”

“I’ll be glad to make you a sandwich.”

“No. Really. I’m not hungry.” The girl looked pale and a little sick.

“Would you like to go to bed then?”

“I have no choice.” Stella heard herself, and added: “That was rude, wasn’t it? I didn’t mean it to be. It’s awfully kind of you to take me in. It was Mr. Archer who gave me no choice.”

“I had no choice, either,” I said. “What would you do if you had one?”

“I’d be with Tommy, wherever he is.”

Her mouth began to work, and so did the delicate flesh around her eyes and mouth. The mask of a crying child seemed to be struggling for possession of her face. She ran away from it, or from our eyes, up the circular stairs to the balcony.

Susanna called after her before she closed the door: “Pajamas on the bed, new toothbrush in the bathroom.”

“You’re an efficient hostess,” I said.

“Thank you. Have a drink before you go.”

“It wouldn’t do anything for me.”

“Do you want to go into where you’re going and what you have to do?”

“I’m on my way to the Barcelona Hotel, but I keep running into detours.”

She reacted more sharply than she had any apparent reason to. “Is that what I am, a detour?”

“Stella was the detour. You’re the United States Cavalry.”

“I love your imagery.” She made a face. “What on earth are you planning to do at the old Barcelona? Isn’t it closed down?”

“There’s at least one man living there, a watchman who used to be the hotel detective, named Otto Sipe.”

“Good Lord, I think I know him. Is he a big red-faced character with a whisky breath?”

“That’s probably the man. How do you happen to know him?”

She hesitated before she answered, in a careful voice: “I sort of frequented the Barcelona at one time, way back at the end of the war. That was where I met Carol.”

“And Mr. Sipe.”

“And Mr. Sipe.”

She wouldn’t tell me any more.

“You have no right to cross-question me,” she said finally. “Leave me alone.”

“I’ll be glad to.”

She followed me to the door. “Don’t leave on that note. Please. I’m not holding back for the fun of it. Why do you think I’ve been lying awake all night?”

“Guilt?”

“Nonsense. I’m not ashamed of anything.” But there was shame in her eyes, deeper than her knowledge of herself. “Anyway, the little I know can’t be of any importance.”

“Which is why it keeps you awake.”

“You’re not being fair. You’re trying to use my personal feeling for you—”

“I didn’t know it existed. If it does, I ought to have a right to use it any way I need to.”

“You don’t have that right, though. My privacy is a very precious thing to me, and you have no right to violate it.”

“Even to save a life?”

Stella opened her door and came out on the balcony. She looked a little like a young, pajamaed saint in a very large niche.

“If you
adults,”
she said, “will lower your voices a few decibels, it might be possible to get a little sleep.”

“Sorry,” I said to both of them.

Stella retreated. Susanna said: “Whose life is in danger, Lew?”

“Tom Hillman’s for one. Possibly others, including mine.”

She touched the front of my jacket. “You’re wearing a shoulder holster. Is Otto Sipe one of the kidnappers?”

I countered with a question: “Was he a man in your life?”

She was offended. “Of course not. Go away now.” She pushed me out. “Take care.”

The night air was chilly on my face.

T
RAFFIC WAS SPARSE
on the coastal highway. Occasional night-crawling trucks went by, blazing with red and yellow lights. This stretch of highway was an ugly oil-stained place, fouled by petroleum fumes and rubbed barren by tires. Even the sea below it had a used-dishwater odor.

Ben Daly’s service station was dark, except for an inside bulb left on to discourage burglars. I left my car in his lot, beside an outside telephone booth, and crossed the highway to the Barcelona Hotel.

It was as dead as Nineveh. In the gardens behind the main building a mockingbird tried a few throbbing notes, like a tiny heart of sound attempting to beat, and then subsided. The intermittent mechanical movement of the highway was the only life in the inert black night.

I went up to the front door where the bankruptcy notice was posted and knocked on the glass with my flashlight. I knocked repeatedly, and got no answer. I was about to punch out a pane
of glass and let myself in. Then I noticed that the door was unlocked. It opened under my hand.

I entered the lobby, jostling a couple of ghosts. They were Susanna, twenty years old, and a man without a face. I told them to get the hell out of my way.

I went down the corridor where Mr. Sipe had first appeared with his light, past the closed, numbered doors, to a door at the end which was standing slightly ajar. I could hear breathing inside the dark room, the heavy sighing breathing of a man in sleep or stupor. The odor of whisky was strong.

I reached inside the door and found the light switch with my right hand. I turned it on and shifted my hand to my gun butt. There was no need. Sipe was lying on the bed, fully clothed, with his ugly nostrils glaring and his loose mouth sighing at the ceiling. He was alone.

There was hardly space for anyone else. The room had never been large, and it was jammed with stuff which looked as if it had been accumulating for decades. Cartons and packing cases, piles of rugs, magazines and newspapers, suitcases and foot lockers, were heaped at the back of the room almost to the ceiling. On the visible parts of the walls were pictures of young men in boxing stance, interspersed with a few girlie pictures.

Empty whisky bottles were ranged along the wall beside the door. A half-full bottle stood by the bed where Sipe was lying. I turned the key that was in the lock of the door and took a closer look at the sleeping man.

He wasn’t just sleeping. He was out, far out and possibly far gone. If I had put a match to his lips, his breath would have ignited like an alcohol burner. Even the front of his shirt seemed to be saturated with whisky, as though he’d poured it over himself in one last wild libation before he passed out.

His gun was stuck in the greasy waistband of his trousers. I transferred it to my jacket pocket before I tried to rouse him. He wouldn’t wake up. I shook him. He was inert as a side of beef, and his big head rolled loosely on the pillow. I slapped his pitted red cheeks. He didn’t even groan.

I went into the adjoining bathroom—it was also a kind of kitchen fitted out with an electric plate and a percolator that
smelled of burned coffee—and filled the percolator with cold water from the bathtub faucet. This I poured over Sipe’s head and face, being careful not to drown him. He didn’t wake up.

I was getting a little worried, not so much about Sipe as about the possibility that he might never be able to give me his story. There was no way of telling how many of the bottles in the room had been emptied recently. I felt his pulse: laboriously slow. I lifted one of his eyelids. It was like looking down into a red oyster.

I had noticed that the bathroom was one of those with two doors, serving two rooms, that you find in older hotels. I went through it into the adjoining bedroom and shone my light around. It was a room similar in shape and size to the other, but almost bare. A brass double bed with a single blanket covering the mattress was just about the only furniture. The blanket lay in the tumbled folds that a man, or a boy, leaves behind when he gets up.

Hung over the head of the bed, like the limp truncated shadow of a boy, was a black sweater. It was a knitted sweater, and it had a raveled sleeve. Where the yarn was snarled and broken I could see traces of light-colored grease, the kind they use on the locks of automobile trunks. In the wastebasket I found several cardboard baskets containing the remains of hamburgers and french frieds.

My heart was beating in my ears. The sweater was pretty good physical evidence that Stella had not been conned. Tom was alive.

I found Sipe’s keys and locked him up in his room and went through every other room in the building. There were nearly a hundred guest and service rooms, and it took a long time. I felt like an archaeologist exploring the interior of a pyramid. The Barcelona’s palmy days seemed that long ago.

All I got for my efforts was a noseful of dust. If Tom was in the building, he was hiding. I had a feeling that he wasn’t there, that he had left the Barcelona for good. Anybody would if he had the chance.

I went back across the highway to Daly’s station. My flashlight found a notice pasted to the lower righthand corner of the
front door: “In case of emergency call owner,” with Daly’s home number. I called it from the outside booth, and after a while got an answer:

“Daly here.”

“Lew Archer. I’m the detective who was looking for Harold Harley.”

“This is a heck of a time to be looking for anybody.”

“I found Harley, thanks to you. Now I need your help in some more important business.”

“What’s the business?”

“I’ll tell you when you get here. I’m at your station.”

Daly had the habit of serviceability. “Okay. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

I waited for him in my car, trying to put the case together in my mind. It was fairly clear that Sipe and Mike Harley had been working together, and had used the Barcelona as a hideout. It didn’t look as if Tom had been a prisoner; more likely a willing guest, as Harley had said from the start. Even with Laguna Perdida School in the background, it was hard to figure out why a boy would do this to his parents and himself.