Росс Макдональд - The Far Side of the Dollar

“Can you give me a minute, Mr. Hillman?”

“Sorry. I have an appointment.”

“The lieutenant can wait. I want to say this. I admit I made a mistake last night. But you made a mistake in getting Sponti to drop me.”

He looked at me down his patrician nose. “You’d naturally think so. It’s costing you money.”

“Look, I’m sorry about last night. I was overeager. That’s the defect of a virtue. I want to carry on with the search for your son.”

“What’s the use? He’s probably dead. Thanks to you.”

“That’s a fairly massive accusation, Mr. Hillman.”

“Take it. It’s yours. And please get out of my way.”

He looked compulsively at his wristwatch. “I’m already late.”

He brushed past me and ran upstairs as if I might pursue him. It wasn’t a pleasant interview. The unpleasantness stuck in my crop all the way to Los Angeles.

I BOUGHT A hat a size too large, to accommodate my bandages, and paid a brief visit to the Hollywood division of the LAPD. None of the detective-sergeants in the upstairs offices recognized Mrs. Brown in her deathly disguise. I went from the station to the newsroom of the Hollywood Reporter . Most of the people at work there resented being shown such pictures. The ones who gave them an honest examination failed to identify Mrs. Brown.

I tried a number of flesh peddlers long the Strip, with the same lack of success and the same effect. The photographs made me unpopular. These guys and dolls pursuing the rapid buck hated to be reminded of what was waiting on the far side of the last dollar. The violence of the woman’s death only made it worse. It could happen to anybody, any time.

I started back to my office. I intended to call Bastian and ask him to rush me a Xerox copy of the composite sketch as soon as his artist had completed it. Then I thought of Joey Sylvester.

Joey was an old agent who maintained an office of sorts two blocks off Sunset and two flights up. He hadn’t been able to adapt to the shift of economic power from the major studios to the independent producers. He lived mainly on his share of residuals from old television movies, and on his memories.

I knocked on the door of his cubbyhole and heard him hiding his bottle, as if I might be the ghost of Louis B. Mayer or an emissary from J. Arthur Rank. Joey looked a little disappointed when he opened the door and it was only me. But he resurrected the bottle and offered me a drink in a paper cup. He had a glass tumbler for his own use, and I happened to know that nearly every day he sat at his desk and absorbed a quart of bourbon and sometimes a quart and a half.

He was a baby-faced old man with innocent white hair and crafty eyes. His mind was like an old-fashioned lamp with its wick in alcohol, focused so as to light up the past and its chauffeur-driven Packard, and cast the third-floor-walkup present into cool shadow.

It wasn’t long past noon, and Joey was still in fair shape. “It’s good to see you, Lew boy. I drink to your health.”

He did so, with one fatherly hand on my shoulder.

“I drink to yours.”

The hand on my shoulder reached up and took my hat off. “What did you do to your head?”

“I was slightly shot last night.”

“You mean you got drunk and fell down?”

“Shot with a gun,” I said.

He clucked. “You shouldn’t expose yourself the way you do. Know what you ought to do, Lew boy? Retire and write your memoirs. The unvarnished sensational truth about Hollywood.”

“It’s been done a thousand times, Joey. Now they’re even doing it in the fan mags.”

“Not the way you could do it. Give’em the worm’s-eye view. There’s a title!”

He snapped his fingers. “I bet I could sell your story for twenty-five G’s, make it part of a package with Steve McQueen. Give some thought to it, Lew boy. I could open up a lovely jar of olives for you.”

“I just opened a can of peas, Joey, and I wonder if you can help me with it. How is your tolerance for pictures of dead people?”

“I’ve seen a lot of them die.”

His free hand fluttered toward the wall above his desk. It was prepared with inscribed photographs of vanished players. His other hand raised his tumbler. “I drink to them.”

I cluttered his desk top with the angry pictures. He looked them over mournfully. “Ach!” he said. “What the human animal does to itself? Am I supposed to know her?”

“She’s supposed to have worked in pictures. You know more actors than anybody.”

“I did at one time. No more.”

“I doubt that she’s done any acting recently. She was on the skids.”

“It can happen overnight.”

In a sense, it had happened to him. He put on his glasses, turned on a desk lamp, and studied the pictures intensively. After a while he said: “Carol?”

“You know her.”

He looked at me over his glasses. “I couldn’t swear to it in court. I once knew a little blonde girl, natural blonde, with ears like that. Notice that they’re small and close to the head and rather pointed. Unusual ears for a girl.”

“Carol who?”

“I can’t remember. It was a long time ago, back in the forties. I don’t think she was using her own name, anyway.”

“Why not?”

“She had a very stuffy family back in Podunk. They disapproved of the acting bit. I seem to remember she told me she ran away from home.”

“In Podunk?”

“I didn’t mean that literally. Matter of fact, I think she came from some place in Idaho.”

“Say that again.”

“Idaho. Is your dead lady from Idaho?”

“Her husband drives a car with an Idaho license. Tell me more about Carol. When and where did you know her?”

“Right here in Hollywood. A friend of mine took an interest in the girl and brought her to me. She was a lovely child. Untouched.”

His hands flew apart in the air, untouching her. “All she had was high-school acting experience, but I got her a little work. It wasn’t hard in those days, with the war still going on. And I had a personal in with all the casting directors on all the lots.”

“What year was it, Joey?”

He took off his glasses and squinted into the past. “She came to me in the spring of ’45, the last year of the war.”

Mrs. Brown, if she was Carol, had been around longer than I’d thought. “How old was she then?”

“Very young. Just a child, like I said. Maybe sixteen.”

“And who was the friend who took an interest in her?”

“It isn’t like you think. It was a woman, one of the girls in the story department at Warner’s. She’s producing a series now at Television City. But she was just a script girl back in the days I’m talking about.”

“You wouldn’t be talking about Susanna Drew?”

“Yeah. Do you know Susanna?”

“Thanks to you. I met her at a party at your house, when you were living in Beverly Hills.”

Joey looked startled, as though the shift from one level of the past to another had caught him unawares. “I remember. That must have been ten years ago.”

He sat and thought about ten years ago, and so did I. I had taken Susanna home from Joey’s party, and we met at other parties, by agreement. We had things to talk about. She picked my brains for what I knew about people, and I picked hers for what she knew about books. I was crazy about her insane sense of humor.

The physical thing came more slowly, as it often does when it promises to be real. I think we tried to force it. We’d both been drinking, and a lot of stuff boiled up from Susanna’s childhood. Her father had been a professor at UCLA, who lost his wife young, and he had supervised Susanna’s studies. Her father was dead, but she could still feel his breath on the back of her neck.