Росс Макдональд - The Far Side of the Dollar

“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?”