Росс Макдональд - The Far Side of the Dollar

“On the other hand,” he said, “there’s nothing in there I need, including you. You can stay here on your can if you want to. Make up your mind right now.”

He waited. He couldn’t outwait her.

“This is your last chance. I’ll count to three. If you don’t open up, I’m traveling alone.”

He counted, one, two, three, but it would take bigger magic to reach her. “Good riddance to bad rubbish,” he said.

His footsteps moved away on the stones. The car door creaked. I couldn’t let him go.

I snapped back the lock and opened the door and rushed him. His shadowy hatted figure was halfway into his car, with one foot on the ground. He whirled. The gun was still in his hand. It gave out a hot little flame. I could feel it sear me.

I staggered across the gravel and got hold of his twisting body. He hammered my hands loose with the butt of his gun. I had blood in my eyes, and I couldn’t avoid the gun butt when it smashed into my skull. A kind of chandelier lit up in my head and then crashed down into darkness.

Next thing I was a VIP traveling with a police guard in the back of a chauffeured car. The turban I could feel on my head suggested to the joggled brain under it that I was a rajah or a maharajah. We turned into a driveway under a red light, which excited me. Perhaps I was being taken to see one of my various concubines.

I raised the question with the uniformed men sitting on either side of me. Gently but firmly, they helped me out of the patrol car and walked me through swinging doors, which a man in white held open, into a glaring place that smelled of disinfectants.

They persuaded me to sit down on a padded table and then to lie down. My heart hurt. I felt it with my hands. It had a towel around it, sticky with blood.

A large young face with a moustache leaned over me upside down. Large hairy hands removed the towel and did some probing and scouring in my scalp. It stung.

“You’re a lucky man. It parted your hair for you, kind of permanently.”

“How bad is it, Doctor?”

“The bullet wound isn’t serious, just a crease. As I said, you’re lucky. This other lesion is going to take longer to heal. What did you get hit with?”

“Gun butt. I think.”

“More fun and games,” he said.

“Did they catch him?”

“You’ll have to ask them. They haven’t told me a thing.”

He clipped parts of my head and put some clamps in it and gave me a drink of water and an aspirin. Then he left me lying alone in the white-partitioned cubicle. My two guards moved rapidly into the vacuum.

They were sheriff’s men, wearing peaked hats and tan uniforms. They were young and hearty, with fine animal bodies and rather animal, not so fine, faces. Good earnest boys, but a little dull. They said they wanted to help me.

“Why did you kill her?” the dark one said.

“I didn’t. She’d been dead for some time when I found her.”

“That doesn’t let you out. Mr. Stanislaus said you were there earlier in the day.”

“He was with me all the time.”

“That’s what you say,” the fair one said.

This repartee went on for some time, like a recording of an old vaudeville act, which some collector had unwisely preserved. I tried to question them. They wouldn’t tell me anything. My head was feeling worse, but oddly enough I began to think better with it. I even managed to get up on my elbows and look at them on the level.

“I’m a licensed private detective from Los Angeles.”

“We know that,” the dark one said.

I felt for my wallet. It was missing. “Give me my wallet.”

“You’ll get it back all in good time. Nobody’s going to steal it.”

“I want to talk to the sheriff.”

“He’s in bed asleep.”

“Is there a captain or lieutenant on duty?”

“The lieutenant is busy at the scene of the crime. You can talk to him in the morning. The doctor says you stay here overnight. Concussion. What did the woman hit you with, anyway?”

“Her husband hit me, with a gun butt.”

“I hardly blame him,” the fair one said emotionally, “after what you did to his wife.”

“Were you shacked up with her?” the dark one said.

I looked from one healthy smooth face to the other. They didn’t look sadistic, or sound corrupt, and I wasn’t afraid for myself. Sooner or later the mess would be straightened out. But I was afraid.

“Listen,” I said, “you’re wasting time on me. I had legitimate business at the court. I was investigating–” The fear came up in my throat and choked off the rest of the sentence. It was fear for the boy.

“Investigating what?” the dark one said.

“Law enforcement in this country. It stinks.”

I wasn’t feeling too articulate.

“We’ll law-enforcement you,” the dark one said. He was broad, with muscular shoulders. He moved them around in the air a little bit and pretended to catch a fly just in front of my face.

“Lay off, muscle,” I said.

The large, moustached face of the doctor appeared in the entrance to the cubicle. “Everything okay in here?”

I said above the deputies’ smiling assurances: “I want to make a phone call.”

The doctor looked doubtfully from me to the officers. “I don’t know about that.”

“I’m a private detective investigating a crime. I’m not free to talk about it without the permission of my principal. I want to call him.”

“There’s no facilities for that,” the dark deputy said.

“How about it, Doctor? You’re in charge here, and I have a legal right to make a phone call.”

He was a very young man behind his moustache. “I don’t know. There’s a telephone booth down the hall. Do you think you can make it?”

“I never felt better in my life.”

But when I swung my legs down, the floor seemed distant and undulant. The deputies had to help me to the booth and prop me up on the stool inside of it. I pulled the folding door shut. Their faces floated outside the wired glass like bulbous fishes, a dark one and a fair one, nosing around a bathyscaph on the deep ocean floor.

Technically Dr. Sponti was my principal, but it was Ralph Hillman’s number I asked Information for. I had a dime in my pocket, fortunately, and Hillman was there. He answered the phone himself on the first ring: “Yes?”

“This is Archer.” He groaned.

“Have you heard anything from Tom?” I said.

“No. I followed instructions to the letter, and when I came up from the beach the money was gone. He’s double-crossed me,” he said bitterly.

“Did you see him?”

“No. I made no attempt to.”

“I did.”

I told Hillman what had happened, to me and to Mrs. Brown.

His voice came thin and bleak over the wire. “And you think these are the same people?”

“I think Brown’s your man. Brown is probably an alias. Does the name Harold Harley mean anything to you?”

“What was that again?”

“Harold or ‘Har’ Harley. He’s a photographer.”

“I never heard of him.”

I wasn’t surprised. Harley’s yellow card was the kind that businessmen distributed by the hundred, and had no necessary connection with Brown.

“Is that all you wanted?” Hillman said. “I’m trying to keep this line open.”

“I haven’t got to the main thing. The police are on my back. I can’t explain what I was doing at the auto court without dragging in the extortion bit, and your son.”

“Can’t you give them a story?”

“It wouldn’t be wise. This is a capital case, a double one.”

“Are you trying to tell me that Tom is dead?”

“I meant that kidnapping is a capital crime. But you are dealing with a killer. I think at this point you should level with the police, and get their help. Sooner or later I’m going to have to level with them.”