Росс Макдональд - The Far Side of the Dollar

There was command in his voice. I stood and watched him pick up the receiver, hold it to his head like a black scorpion, and listen to what it said.

“Yes, this is Mr. Hillman. Just a minute.”

He brought a business envelope and a ballpoint pen out of his inside pocket, turned on an overhead light, and got ready to write on the bar. “Go ahead.”

For about half a minute he listened and wrote. Then he said: “I think so. Aren’t there steps going down to the beach?”

He listened and wrote. “Where shall I walk to?”

He turned the envelope over and wrote some more. “Yes,” he said. “I park two blocks away, at Seneca, and approach the steps on foot. I put the money under the right side of the top step. Then I go down to the beach for half an hour. Is that all?”

There was a little more. He listened to it. Finally he said: “Yes. But the deal is very much on as far as I’m concerned. I’ll be there at nine sharp.”

There was a pathetic note in his voice, the note of a salesman trying to nail down an appointment with a refractory client.

“Wait,” he said, and groaned into the dead receiver.

Dick Leandro, moving like a cat, was in the alcove ahead of me. “What is it, Mr. Hillman? What’s the trouble?”

“I wanted to ask about Tom. He didn’t give me a chance.”

He lifted his face to the plaster ceiling. “I don’t know if he’s alive or dead.”

“They wouldn’t kill him, would they?” the young man said. He sounded as though he’d had a first frightening hint of his own mortality.

“I don’t know, Dick. I don’t know.”

Hillman’s head rolled from one side to the other.

The young man put his arm around his shoulder. “Take it easy now, Skipper. We’ll get him back.”

Hillman poured himself a heavy slug of bourbon and tossed it down. It brought a little color into his face. I said: “Same man?”

“Yes.”

“And he told you where to make the money-drop.”

“Yes.”

“Do you want company?”

“I have to go there alone. He said he’d be watching.”

“Where are you to go?”

Hillman looked at each of our faces in turn, lingeringly, as if he was saying goodbye. “I’ll keep that to myself. I don’t want anything to wreck the arrangements.”

“Somebody should know about them, though, in case anything does go wrong. You’re taking a chance.”

“I’d rather take a chance with my own life than my son’s.”

He said it as if he meant it, and the words seemed to renew his courage. He glanced at his wristwatch. “It’s twenty-five to nine. It will take me up to twenty minutes to get there. He didn’t give me much leeway.”

“Can you drive okay?” Leandro said.

“Yes. I’m all right. I’ll just go up and tell Ellie that I’m leaving. You stay in the house with her, won’t you, Dick?”

“I’ll be glad to.”

Hillman went upstairs, still clutching his scribbled-over envelope. I said to Leandro: “Where is Seneca Street?”

“Seneca Road. In Ocean View.”

“Are there steps going down to the beach anywhere near there?”

“Yeah, but you’re not supposed to go there. You heard Mr. Hillman.”

“I heard him.”

Hillman came down and took the parcel of money out of Leandro’s hands. He thanked the young man, and his voice was deep and gentle as well as melancholy.

We stood on the flagstone steps and watched him drive away into the darkness under the trees. In the hole in the dark west a little light still persisted, like the last light there was ever going to be.

I WENT THROUGH the house to the kitchen and asked Mrs. Perez to make me a plain cheese sandwich. She grumbled, but she made it. I ate it leaning against the refrigerator. Mrs. Perez wouldn’t talk about the trouble in the family. She seemed to have a superstitious feeling that trouble was only amplified by words. When I tried to question her about Tom’s habits, she gradually lost her ability to understand my English.

Dick Leandro had gone upstairs to sit with Elaine. He seemed more at home than Tom appeared to have been with his own family. I went out through the reception hall. It was nine o’clock, and I couldn’t wait any longer.

Driving along the highway to Ocean View, I argued jesuitically with myself that I had stayed clear of the money-drop, I wasn’t double-dealing with Hillman, who wasn’t my client in any case, and besides I had no proof that Mrs. Brown and her husband were connected with the extortion attempt.

It was deep night over the sea, moonless and starless. I left my car at a view-point near Dack’s Auto Court. The sea was a hollow presence with a voice. I hiked down the access road to the court, not using the flashlight that I carried with me.

The office was lighted and had a neon “Vacancy” sign above the door. Avoiding the spill of light from it, I went straight to cottage number seven. It was dark. I knocked, and got no answer. I let myself in with the key I had and closed the self-locking door behind me.

Mrs. Brown was waiting; I stumbled over her foot and almost fell on top of her before I switched on my flashlight. She lay in her winking sequined gown under the jittery beam. Blood was tangled like tar in her bright hair. Her face was mottled with bruises, and misshapen. She looked as though she had been beaten to death.

I touched her hand. She was cold. I turned the light away from her lopsided grin.

The beam jumped around the green walls, the newspaper littered floor. It found a large strapped canvas suitcase standing at the foot of the bed with two paper bags beside it. One of the bags contained a bottle of cheap wine, the other sandwiches that were drying out.

I unstrapped the suitcase and opened it. An odor rose from its contents like sour regret. Men’s and women’s things were bundled indiscriminately together, dirty shirts and soiled slips, a rusting safety razor and a dabbled jar of cold cream and a bottle of mascara, a couple of dresses and some lingerie, a man’s worn blue suit with a chain-store label and nothing in the pockets but tobacco powder and, tucked far down in the outer breast pocket, a creased yellow business card poorly printed on cheap paper:

HAROLD ‘HAR’ HARLEY

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I found the woman’s imitation snakeskin purse on a chair by the side window. It contained a jumble of cosmetics and some frayed blue chip stamps. No wallet, no identification, no money except for a single silver dollar in the bottom of the bag. There were also a pack of cards, slick with the oil of human hands, and a dice which came up six all three times I rolled it.

I heard a car approaching, and headlights swept the window on the far side. I switched off my flashlight. The wheels of the car crunched in the gravel and came to a halt directly in front of the cottage. Someone got out of the car and turned the cottage doorknob. When the door refused to open, a man’s voice said: “Let me in.”

It was the slightly wheezing, whining voice I’d heard that afternoon on Hillman’s phone. I moved toward the door with the dark flashlight raised in my hand. The man outside rattled the knob.

“I know you’re in there, I saw the light. This is no time to carry a grudge, hon.”

The woman lay in her deep waiting silence. I stepped around her and stood against the wall beside the door. I shifted the flash to my left hand and fumbled for the spring lock with my right.

“I hear you, damn you. You want another taste of what you had today?”

He waited, and then said: “If you won’t open the door, I’ll shoot the lock out.”

I heard the click of a hammer. I stayed where I was beside the door, holding the flashlight like a club. But he didn’t fire.