Росс Макдональд - The Far Side of the Dollar

“So I should be in the mortuary business.” He sighed. “Or anything but the brother business. I know what I have to go through.”

“It’s like a sickness. It’ll pass.”

“My brother,” he said, “is a sickness that never passes.”

“He’s going to, this time, Harold. He’ll be taken care of for the rest of his life.”

“If you catch him.”

“We’ll catch him. Where did he head from here?”

“He didn’t tell me.”

“Where do you think?”

“Nevada, I guess. It’s always been his favorite hangout. When he has money he can’t stay away from the tables.”

“Where did he live when he worked on the South Shore of Tahoe?”

“They were buying a trailer but he lost that when he lost his barkeep job. His boss said he got too rough with the drunks. After that they moved from one place to another, mostly motels and lodges around the lake. I couldn’t give you any definite address.”

“What was the name of the club he worked at?”

“The Jet. Carol worked there, too, off and on. She was sort of a singing waitress. We went to hear her sing there once. Lila thought she was lousy, but I thought she was okay. She sang pretty sexy songs, and that’s why Lila–”

I interrupted him. “Do you have a phone? I want to make a couple of collect calls.”

“It’s in the front room.”

I took the rifle with me, in case he got further ideas about shooting himself, or me. The walls of the front room were crowded as the walls of a picture gallery with Harold’s photographs. Old Man, Old Woman, Young Woman, Sunset, Wild flowers, Mountain, Seascape; and Lila. Most of them had been hand-tinted, and three portraits of Lila smiled at me from various angles, so that I felt surrounded by toothy, flesh-colored face.

I went back to the bedroom. Harold was putting on his shoes He looked up rather resentfully.

“I’m okay. You don’t have to keep checking up on me.”

“I was wondering if you had a picture of Mike.”

“I have one. It’s nearly twenty years old. After he got into trouble he never let me take him.”

“Let’s see it.”

“I wouldn’t know where to find it. Anyway, it was done when he was a kid and he doesn’t look like that anymore. It’s an art study, like, of his muscles, in boxing trunks.”

“What does he look like now?”

“I thought you saw him.”

“It was dark at the time.”

“Well, he’s still a fairly nice-looking man, I mean his features. He quit fighting before he got banged up too bad. He has brown hair – no gray – he parts it on the side. Mike always did have a fine head of hair.”

He scratched at his own thin hair. “Greenish-gray eyes, with kind of a wild look in them when he’s got something going. Thin mouth. I always thought it was kind of a cruel mouth. Teeth not so good. But I dunno, he’s still a nice looking fellow, and well set-up. He keeps himself in pretty good physical shape.”

“Height and weight?”

“He’s an inch or so under six feet. He used to fight light-heavy, but he must be heavier now. Maybe one eighty-five.”

“Any scars or distinguishing marks?”

Harold jerked his head up. “Yeah. He’s got scars on his back where Dad used to beat him. I got some of my own.”

He pulled up his undershirt and showed me the white scars all up and down his back, like hieroglyphs recording history. Harold seemed to take his scars as a matter of course.

“Are your parents still living?”

“Sure. Dad’s still running the farm. It’s on the Snake River,” he said without nostalgia. “Pocatello Rural Route 7. But Mike wouldn’t be going there. He hates Idaho.”

“You never can tell, though,” I said as I made some notes.

“Take my word. He broke with Dad over twenty years ago.”

As an afterthought, he said: “There’s a portrait I did of Dad in the front room. I call it ‘Old Man’.”

Before I sat down with the telephone I looked more closely at the portrait: a grizzled farmer with flat angry eyes and a mouth like a bear trap. Then I called Arnie Walters in Reno and gave him a rundown on the old man’s son, Mike Harley, ex-sailor, ex-fighter, ex-bartender, gambler, kidnapper, wife-beater, putative murderer and driver of a 1958 Plymouth two-door, California license number IKT 449.

“You’ve been busy,” Arnie said when he finished recording my facts. “We have, too, but we haven’t come up with anything. We will now.”

He hesitated. “Just how much muscle do you want put info the operation?”

“You mean how much can I pay for?”

“Your client.”

“I lost my client. I’m hoping this stuff I’ve uncovered will get me another one, but it hasn’t yet.”

Arnie whistled. “What you’re doing isn’t ethical.”

“Yes it is. I’m temporarily an investigator for the local sheriff’s office.”

“Now I know you’ve flipped. I hate to bring this up, Lew, but you owe me three hundred dollars and that’s a charity price for what we’ve done. Tomorrow at this time it’ll be six hundred anyway, if we stay with it. With our overhead we just can’t work for nothing.”

“I know that. You’ll be paid.”

“When?”

“Soon. I’ll talk to you in the morning.”

“What do we do in the meantime?”

“Carry on.”

“If you say so.”

Arnie hung up on me and left me feeling a little shaky. Six hundred dollars was what I got for working a full week, and I didn’t work every week. I had about three hundred dollars in the bank, about two hundred in cash. I owned an equity in the car and some clothes and furniture. My total net worth, after nearly twenty years in the detective business, was in the neighborhood of thirty-five hundred dollars. And Ralph Hillman, with his money, was letting me finance my own search for his son.

On the other hand, I answered my self-pity, I was doing what I wanted to be doing. I wanted to take the man who had taken me.

I wanted to find Tom. I couldn’t drop the case just as it was breaking. And I needed Arnie to backstop me in Nevada. Carry on.

I made a second collect call, to Lieutenant Bastian. It was long past midnight, but he was still on duty in his office. I told him I was bringing in a witness, and I gave him a capsule summary of what the witness was going to say. Bastian expressed a proper degree of surprise and delight.

Harold was still in the bedroom, standing pensively beside the tie rack attached to the closet door. He was fully dressed except for a tie.

“What kind of a tie do you think I ought to wear? Lila always picks out the tie I wear.”

“You don’t need a tie.”

“They’ll be taking my picture, won’t they? I’ve got to be properly dressed.”

He fingered the tie rack distraughtly.

I chose one for him, a dark blue tie with a conservative pattern, the kind you wear to the funerals of friends. We closed up the house and garage and drove south out of Long Beach.

It was less than an hour’s drive to Pacific Point. Harold was intermittently talkative, but his silences grew longer. I asked him about his and his brother’s early life in Idaho. It had been a hard life, in an area subject to blizzards in the winter and floods in the spring and extreme heat in the summer. Their father believed that boys were a kind of domestic animal that ought to be put to work soon after weaning. They were hoeing corn and digging potatoes when they were six, and milking the cows at eight or nine.

They could have stood the work, if it hadn’t been for the punishment that went with it. I’d seen Harold’s scars. The old man used a piece of knotted wire on them. Mike was the first to run away. He lived in Pocatello for a couple of years with a man named Robert Brown, a high-school coach and counselor who took him in and tried to give him a chance.