Росс Макдональд - The Far Side of the Dollar

One end of the main public room in the telephone building was lined with long-distance booths and shelves of out-of-town directories. Only the main cities in Idaho, like Boise and Pocatello and Idaho Falls, were represented. I looked through their directories, for a photographer named Harold Harley. He wasn’t listed. Robert Brown was, by the legion, but the name was almost certainly an alias.

I installed myself in one of the booths and placed a long-distance call to Arnie Walters, a Reno detective who often worked with me. I had no Idaho contact, and Reno was on the fastest route to Idaho. Reno itself had a powerful attraction for thieves with sudden money.

“Walters Agency,” Arnie said.

“This is Lew.”

I told him where I was calling from, and why.

“You come up with some dillies. Murder and kidnapping, eh?”

“The kidnapping may be a phony. Tom Hillman, the supposed victim, has been palling around with the murdered woman for a couple of weeks.”

“How old did you say he was?”

“Seventeen. He’s big for his age.”

I described Tom Hillman in detail. “He may be traveling with Brown either voluntarily or involuntarily.”

“Or not traveling at all?” Arnie said.

“Or not traveling at all.”

“You know this boy?”

“No.”

“I thought maybe you knew him. Okay. Where does this photographer Harold Harley come in?”

“Harley may be Brown himself, or he may know Brown. His card is the only real lead I have so far. That and the Idaho license. I want you to do two things. Check Idaho and adjoining states for Harley. You have the business directories, don’t you?”

“Yeah, I’ll get Phyllis on them.”

She was his wife and partner.

“The other thing, I want you to look out for Brown and the boy, you and your informers in Tahoe and Vegas.”

“What makes you think they’re headed in this direction?”

“It’s a hunch. The woman had a silver dollar and a loaded dice in her purse.”

“And no identification?”

“Whoever did her in got rid of everything she had in that line. But we’ll identify her. We have her.”

“Let me know when you do.”

I walked across down to the courthouse, under a sky that yesterday’s rain had washed clean. I asked the deputy on duty in the sheriff’s department where to find Lieutenant Bastian. He directed me to the identification laboratory on the second floor.

It was more office than laboratory, a spacious room with pigeons murmuring on the window ledges. The walls were crowded with filing cabinets and hung with maps of the city and county and state. A large adjacent closet was fitted out as a darkroom, with drying racks and a long metal sink.

Bastian got up smiling. His smile wasn’t greatly different from last night’s frown. He laid down a rectangular magnifying glass on top of the photograph he had been studying. Leaning across the desk to take his outstretched hand, I could see that it was a picture of Mrs. Brown in death.

“What killed her, Lieutenant?” I said when we were seated.

“This.”

He held up his right hand and clenched it. His face clenched with it. “The human hand.”

“Robert Brown’s?”

“It looks like it. He gave her a beating early yesterday afternoon, according to Stanislaus. The deputy coroner says she’s been dead that long.”

“Stanislaus told me they quarreled over a telephone call she made.”

“That’s right. We haven’t been able to trace the call, which means it was probably local. She used the phone in Stanislaus’s office, but he claims to know nothing more about it.”

“How does he know Brown gave her a beating?” I said.

“He says a neighbor woman told him. That checks out.”

Bastian wiped his left hand across his tense angry face, without really changing his expression. “It’s terrible the way some people live, that a woman could be killed within a neighbor’s hearing and nobody knows or cares.”

“Not even Brown,” I said. “He thought she was alive at nine-thirty last night. He talked to her through the door, trying to get her to open up. Or he may have been trying to con himself into thinking he hadn’t killed her after all. I don’t think he’s too stable.”

Bastian looked up sharply. “Were you in the cottage when Brown was talking through the door?”

“I was. Incidentally, I recognized his voice. He’s the same man who extorted twenty-five thousand dollars from Ralph Hillman last night. I listened in on a phone call he made to Hillman yesterday.”

Bastian’s right fist was still clenched. He used it to strike the desk top, savagely. The pigeons on the window ledge flew away.

“It’s too damn bad,” he said, “you didn’t bring us in on this yesterday. You might have saved a life, not to mention twenty-five thousand dollars.”

“Tell that to Hillman.”

“I intend to. This morning. Right now I’m telling you.”

“The decision wasn’t mine. I tried to change it. Anyway, I entered the case after the woman was killed.”

“That’s a good place to begin,” Bastian said after a pause. “Go on from there. I want the full record.”

He reached down beside his desk and turned on a recorder. For an hour or more the tape slithered quietly from wheel to wheel as I talked into it. I was client-less and free and I didn’t suppress anything. Not even the possibility that Tom Hillman had cooperated with Brown in extorting money from his father.

“I’d almost like to think that that was true,” Bastian said. “It would mean that the kid is still alive, anyway. But it isn’t likely.”

“Which isn’t likely?”

“Both things. I doubt that he hoaxed his old man, and I doubt that he’s still alive. It looks as if the woman was used as a decoy to get him in position for the kill. We’ll probably find his body in the ocean week after next.”

His words had the weight of experience behind them. Kidnap victims were poor actuarial risks. But I said: “I’m working on the assumption that he’s alive.”

Bastian raised his eyebrows. “I thought Dr. Sponti took you off the case.”

“I still have some of his money.”

Bastian gave me a long cool appraising look. “LA was right. You’re not the usual peeper.”

“I hope not.”

“If you’re staying with it, you can do something for me, as well as for yourself. Help me to get this woman identified.”

He slid the picture of Mrs. Brown out from under the magnifying glass. “This postmortem photo is too rough to circularize. But you could show it around in the right circles. I’m having a police artist make a composite portrait, but that takes time.”

“What about fingerprints?”

“We’re trying that, too, but a lot of women have never been fingerprinted. Meantime, will you try and get an identification? You’re a Hollywood man, and the woman claimed that she was in pictures at one time.”

“That doesn’t mean a thing.”

“It might.”

“But I was planning to try and pick up Brown’s trail in Nevada. If the boy’s alive, Brown knows where to find him.”

“The Nevada police already have our APB on Brown. And you have a private operative on the spot. Frankly, I’d appreciate it if you’ll take this picture to Hollywood with you. I don’t have a man I can spare. By the way, I had your car brought into the county garage.”

Cooperation breeds cooperation. Besides, the woman’s identity was important, if only because the killer had tried to hide it. I accepted the picture, along with several others taken from various angles, and put them in the same pocket as my picture of Tom.

“You can reverse any telephone charges,” Bastian said in farewell.

Halfway down the stairs I ran into Ralph Hillman. At first glance he looked fresher than he had the previous evening. But it was an illusory freshness. The color in his cheeks was hectic, and the sparkle in his eyes was the glint of desperation. He sort of reared back when he saw me, like a spooked horse.