Росс Макдональд - The Far Side of the Dollar

He shook his pitchfork at the reddening sky. I was already in the car and turning up the windows.

I turned them down again as soon as I got a few hundred yards up the lane. My shirt was wet through now, and I could feel sweat running down my legs. Looking back, I caught a glimpse of the river, flowing sleek and solid in the failing light, and it refreshed me.

BEFORE DRIVING OUT to the Harley farm, I had made an evening appointment with Robert Brown and his wife. They already knew what had happened to their daughter. I didn’t have to tell them.

I found their house in the north end of the city, on a pleasant, tree-lined street parallel to Arthur Street. Night had fallen almost completely, and the street-lights were shining under the clotted masses of the trees. It was still very warm. The earth itself seemed to exude heat like a hot-blooded animal.

Robert Brown had been watching for me. He hailed me from his front porch and came out to the curb. A big man with short hair, vigorous in his movements, he still seemed to be wading in some invisible substance, age or sorrow. We shook hands solemnly.

He spoke with more apparent gentleness than force: “I was planning to fly out to California tomorrow. It might have saved you a trip if you had known.”

“I wanted to talk to the Harleys, anyway.”

“I see.”

He cocked his head on one side in a birdlike movement which seemed odd in such a big man. “Did you get any sense out of them?”

“Mrs. Harley made a good deal of sense. Harley didn’t.”

“I’m not surprised. He’s a pretty good farmer, they say, but he’s been in and out of the mental hospital. I took– my wife and I took care of his son Mike during one of his bouts. We took him into our home.”

He sounded ashamed of the act.

“That was a generous thing to do.”

“I’m afraid it was misguided generosity. But who can prophesy the future? Anyway, it’s over now. All over.”

He forgot about me completely for a moment, then came to himself with a start. “Come in, Mr. Archer. My wife will want to talk to you.”

He took me into the living room. It had group and family photos on the walls, and a claustrophobic wallpaper, which lent it some of the stuffiness of an old-fashioned country parlor. The room was sedately furnished with well-cared-for maple pieces. Across the mantel marched a phalanx of sports trophies gleaming gold and silver in the harsh overhead light.

Mrs. Brown was sitting in an armchair under the light. She was a strikingly handsome woman a few years younger than her husband, maybe fifty-five. She had chosen to disguise herself in a stiff and rather dowdy black dress. Her too precisely marcelled brown hair had specks of gray in it. Her fine eyes were confused, and surrounded by dark patches. When she gave me her hand, the gesture seemed less like a greeting than a bid for help.

She made me sit down on a footstool near her. “Tell us all about poor Carol, Mr. Archer.”

All about Carol. I glanced around the safe, middle-class room, with the pictures of Carol’s ancestors on the walls, and back at her parents’ living faces. Where did Carol come in? I could see the source of her beauty in her mother’s undisguisable good looks. But I couldn’t see how one life led to the other, or why Carol’s life had ended as it had.

Brown said: “We know she’s dead, murdered, and that Mike probably did it, and that’s about all.”

His face was like a Roman general’s, a late Roman general’s, after a long series of defeats by barbarian hordes.

“It’s about all I know. Mike seems to have been using her as a decoy in an extortion attempt. You know about the Hillman boy?”

He nodded. “I read about it before I knew that my daughter–” His voice receded.

“They say he may be dead, too,” his wife said.

“He may be, Mrs. Brown.”

“And Mike did these things? I knew he was far gone, but I didn’t know he was a monster.”

“He’s not a monster,” Brown said wearily. “He’s a sick man. His father was a sick man. He still is, after all the mental hospital could do for him.”

“If Mike was so sick, why did you bring him into this house and expose your daughter to him?”

“She’s your daughter, too.”

“I know that. I’m not allowed to forget it. But I’m not the one that ruined her for life.”

“You certainly had a hand in it. You were the one, for instance, who encouraged her to enter that beauty contest.”

“She didn’t win, did she?”

“That was the trouble.”

“Was it? The trouble was the way you felt about that Harley boy.”

“I wanted to help him. He needed help, and he had talent.”

“Talent?”

“As an athlete. I thought I could develop him.”

“You developed him all right.”

They were talking across me, not really oblivious of me, using me as a fulcrum for leverage, or a kind of stand-in for reality. I guessed that the argument had been going on for twenty years.

“I wanted a son,” Brown said.

“Well, you got a son. A fine upstanding son.”

He looked as if he was about to strike her. He didn’t, though. He turned to me: “Forgive us. We shouldn’t do this. It’s embarrassing.”

His wife stared at him in unforgiving silence. I tried to think of something that would break or at least soften the tension between them: “I didn’t come here to start a quarrel.”

“You didn’t start it, let me assure you.”

Brown snickered remorsefully. “It started the day Carol ran off with Mike. It was something I didn’t foresee–”

His wife’s bitter voice cut in: “It started when she was born, Rob. You wanted a son. You didn’t want a daughter. You rejected her and you rejected me.”

“I did nothing of the sort.”

“He doesn’t remember,” she said to me. “He has one of these convenient memories that men have. You blot out anything that doesn’t suit your upright idea of yourself. My husband is a very dishonest man.”

She had a peculiar angry gnawing smile.

“That’s nonsense,” he protested. “I’ve been faithful to you all my life.”

“Except in ways I couldn’t cope with. Like when you brought the Harley boy into our home. The great altruist. The noble counselor.”

“You have no right to jeer at me,” he said. “I wanted to help him. I had no way of knowing that he couldn’t be reached.”

“Go on. You wanted a son any way you could get one.”

He said stubbornly: “You don’t understand. A man gets natural pleasure from raising a boy, teaching him what he knows.”

“All you succeeded in teaching Mike was your dishonesty.”

He turned to me with a helpless gesture, his hands swinging out. “She blames me for everything.”

Walking rather aimlessly, he went out to the back part of the house.

I felt as if I’d been left alone with a far from toothless lioness. She stirred in her chair: “I blame myself as well for being a fool. I married a man who has the feelings of a little boy. He still gets excited about his high-school football teams. The boys adore him. Everybody adores him. They talk about him as if he was some kind of a plaster saint. And he couldn’t even keep his own daughter out of trouble.”

“You and your husband should be pulling together.”

“It’s a little late to start, isn’t it?”

Her glance came up to my face, probed at it for a moment, moved restlessly from side to side.

“It may be that you’ll kill him if you go on like this.”

“No. He’ll live to be eighty, like his father.”

She jerked her marcelled head toward one of the pictures on the wall. Seen from varying angles, her head was such a handsome object I could hardly take my eyes off it. It was hard to believe that such a finely shaped container could be full of cold boiling trouble.