Росс Макдональд - The Far Side of the Dollar

She had on an apron and a dusting cap, and she pushed a strand of black hair up under the cap. Her breast rose with the gesture. Lila wasn’t a pretty woman, but she had vitality.

“Are you another one of them?” she said.

“Yes. I thought you left Harold.”

“So did I. But I decided to come back.”

“I’m glad you did. He needs your support.”

“Yeah.”

Her voice softened. “What’s going to happen to Harold? Are they going to lock him up and throw the key away?”

“Not if I can help it.”

“Are you with the FBI?”

“I’m more of a free lance.”

“I was wondering. They came this morning and took the car away. No Harold. Now no car. Next they’ll be taking the house from over my head. All on account of that lousy brother of his. It isn’t fair.”

“It’ll be straightened out. I’ll tell you the same thing I told Harold. His best chance of getting free and clear is to tell the truth.”

“The truth is, he let his brother take advantage of him. He always has. Mike is still–” She clapped her hand to her mouth and looked at me over it with alarm in her brown eyes.

“What is Mike still doing, Mrs. Harley?”

She glanced up and down the dingy street. A few young children were playing in the yards, with their mothers watching them. Lila plucked at my sleeve.

“Come inside, will you? Maybe we can make some kind of a deal.”

The front door opened directly into the living room. I stepped over a vacuum-cleaner hose just inside the door.

“I’ve been cleaning the house,” she said. “I had to do something and that was all I could think of.”

“I hope Harold will be coming home to appreciate it soon.”

“Yeah. It would help him, wouldn’t it, if I helped you to nail his brother?”

“It certainly would.”

“Would you let him go if you got Mike in his place?”

“I can’t promise that. I think it would probably happen.”

“Why can’t you promise?”

“I’m just a local investigator. But Mike is the one we really want. Do you know where he is, Mrs. Harley?”

For a long moment she stood perfectly still, her face as unchanging as one of her photographs hanging on the wall. Then she nodded slightly.

“I know where he was at three A.M. this morning.”

She jabbed a thumb toward the telephone. “He called here from Las Vegas at three A.M. He wanted Harold. I told him I didn’t know where Harold was – he was gone when I came home last night.”

“You’re sure it was Mike who called?”

“It couldn’t have been anybody else. I know his voice. And it isn’t the first time he called here, whining and wheedling for some of our hard-earned money.”

“He wanted money?”

“That’s right. I was to wire him five hundred dollars to the Western Union office in Las Vegas.”

“But he was carrying over twenty thousand.”

Her face closed, and became impassive. “I wouldn’t know about that. All I know is what he said. He needed money bad, and I was to wire him five hundred, which he would pay back double in twenty-four hours. I told him I’d see him in the hot place first. He was gambling.”

“It sounds like it, doesn’t it?”

“He’s a crazy gambler,” she said. “I hate a gambler.”

I called the Waiters Agency in Reno. Arnie’s wife and partner Phyllis told me that Arnie had taken an early plane to Vegas. Harold Harley’s two-tone Plymouth had been spotted at a motel on the Vegas Strip.

Not more than two hours later, after a plane ride of my own, I was sitting in a room of the motel talking with Arnie and the Plymouth’s new owner. He was a man named Fletcher who said he was from Phoenix, Arizona, although his accent sounded more like Texas. He was dressed up in a western dude costume, with high-heeled boots, a matching belt with a fancy silver buckle, and an amethyst instead of a tie. His Stetson lay on one of the twin beds, some women’s clothes on the other. The woman was in the bathroom taking a bath, Arnie told me, and I never did see her.

Mr. Fletcher was large and self-assured and very rough-looking. His face had been chopped rather carelessly from granite, then put out to weather for fifty or fifty-five years.

“I didn’t want to buy his heap,” he said. “I have a new Cadillac in Phoenix, you can check that. He didn’t even have a pink slip for it. I paid him five hundred for the heap because he was broke, desperate to stay in the game.”

“What game was that?” I asked him.

“Poker.”

“It was a floating game,” Arnie said, “in one of the big hotels. Mr. Fletcher refuses to name the hotel, or the other players. It went on all day yesterday and most of last night. There’s no telling how much Harley lost, but he lost everything he had.”

“Over twenty thousand, probably. Was the game rigged?”

Fletcher turned his head and looked at me the way a statue looks at a man. “It was an honest game, friend. It had to be. I was the big winner.”

“I wasn’t questioning your honesty.”

“No sir. Some of the finest people in Phoenix visit the little woman and I in our residence and we visit them in their residences. Honest Jack Fletcher, they call me.”

There was a silence in which the three of us sat and listened to the air-conditioner. I said: “That’s fine, Mr. Fletcher. How much did you win?”

“That’s between I and the tax collector, friend. I won a bundle. Which is why I gave him five hundred for his heap. I have no use for the heap. You can take it away.”

He lifted his arm in an imperial gesture.

“We’ll be doing just that,” Arnie said.

“You’re welcome to it. Anything I can do to cooperate.”

“You can answer a few more questions, Mr. Fletcher.”

I got out my picture of Tom. “Did you see this boy with Harley at any time?”

He examined the picture as if it was a card he had drawn, then passed it back to me. “I did not.”

“Hear any mention of him?”

“I never did. Harley came and went by himself and he didn’t talk. You could see he didn’t belong in a high-stakes game, but he had the money, and he wanted to lose it.”

“He wanted to lose it?” Arnie said.

“That’s right, the same way I wanted to win. He’s a born loser, I’m a born winner.”

Fletcher got up and strutted back and forth across the room. He lit a Brazilian cigar, not offering any around. As fast as he blew it out, the smoke disappeared in the draft from the air conditioner.

“What time did the game break up this morning?” I said.

“Around three, when I took my last big pot.” His mouth savored the recollection. “I was willing to stay, but the other people weren’t. Harley wanted to stay, naturally, but he didn’t have the money to back it up. He isn’t much of a poker player, frankly.”

“Did he give you any trouble?”

“No sir. The gentleman who runs the game discourages that sort of thing. No trouble. Harley did put the bite on me at the end. I gave him a hundred dollars ding money to get home.”

“Home where?”

“He said he came from Idaho.”

I took a taxi back to the airport and made a reservation on a plane that stopped in Pocatello. Before sundown I was driving a rented car out of Pocatello along Rural Route Seven, where the elder Harleys lived.

THEIR FARM, GREEN and golden in the slanting light, lay in a curve of the river. I drove down a dusty lane to the farmhouse. It was built of white brick, without ornament of any kind. The barn, unpainted, was weathered gray and in poor repair.

The late afternoon was windless. The trees surrounding the fenced yard were as still as watercolors. The heat was oppressive, in spite of the river nearby, even worse than it had been in Vegas.