Росс Макдональд - The Far Side of the Dollar

A light shone dimly behind my draped front window, and when I tried the door it was unlocked. I had no family, no wife, no girl. I turned the knob quietly, and slowly and tentatively opened the door.

It seemed I had a girl after all. She was curled up on the studio couch under a blanket which came from my bed. The light from a standing lamp shone down on her sleeping face. She looked so young I felt a hundred years old.

I closed the door. “Hey, Stella.”

Her body jerked under the blanket. Throwing it off, she sat up. She was wearing a blue sweater and a skirt. “Oh,” she said. “It’s you.”

“Who were you expecting?”

“I don’t know. But don’t be cross with me. I was just dreaming something, I forget what, but it was depressing.”

Her eyes were still dark with the dream.

“How in the world did you get in here?”

“The manager let me in. I told him I was a witness. He understood.”

“I don’t. A witness to what?”

“Quite a few things,” she said with some spirit. “If you want me to tell you, you can stop treating me like a mentally retarded delinquent. Nobody else does, except my parents.”

I sat on the edge of the studio couch beside her. I liked the girl but at the moment she was an obstruction, and could turn into a serious embarrassment. “Do your parents know you’re here?”

“Of course not. How could I tell them? They wouldn’t have let me come, and I had to come. You ordered me to get in touch with you if I ever heard from Tommy. Your answering service couldn’t find you and finally they gave me your home address.”

“Are you telling me you’ve heard from him?”

She nodded. Her eyes held steady on my face. They were brimming with complex feelings, more womanly than girlish. “He phoned around four o’clock this afternoon. Mother was at the store, and I had a chance to answer the phone myself.”

“Where was he, did he say?”

“Here in–” She hesitated. “He made me promise not to tell anyone. And I’ve already broken my promise once.”

“How did you do that?”

“I put a little note in Mr. Hillman’s mailbox, before I left El Rancho. I couldn’t just leave him dangling, when I knew.”

“What did you tell him?”

“Just that I’d heard from Tommy, and he was alive.”

“It was a kind thing to do.”

“But it broke my promise. He said I wasn’t to tell anyone, especially not his parents.”

“Promises have to be broken sometimes, when there are higher considerations.”

“What do you mean?”

“His safety. I’ve been afraid that Tom was dead. Are you absolutely certain you talked to him?”

“I’m not telling a lie.”

“I mean, you’re sure it wasn’t an imposter, or a tape recording?”

“I’m sure. We talked back and forth.”

“Where was he calling from?”

“I don’t know, but I think it was long distance.”

“What did he say?”

She hesitated again, with her finger raised. “Is it all right for me to tell you, even after I promised?”

“It would be all wrong if you didn’t. You know that, don’t you? You didn’t come all the way here to hold it back.”

“No.”

She smiled a little. “He didn’t tell me too much. He didn’t say a word about the kidnappers. Anyway, the fact that he’s alive is the important thing. He said he was sorry I’d been worried about him, but he couldn’t help it. Then he asked me to meet him and bring some money.”

I was relieved. Tom’s need for money implied that he had no part of the payoff. “How much money?”

“As much as I could get hold of in a hurry. He knew it wouldn’t amount to a great deal. I borrowed some from the people at the beach club. The secretary of the club gave me a hundred dollars of her own money – she knows I’m honest. I took a taxi to the bus station. You know, I never rode on a bus before, except the school bus.”

I cut in impatiently: “Did you meet him here in Los Angeles?”

“No. I was supposed to meet him in the Santa Monica bus station at nine o’clock. The bus was a few minutes late, and I may have missed him. He did say on the phone that he mightn’t be able to make it tonight. In which case I was to meet him tomorrow night. He said he generally only goes out at night.”

“Did he tell you where he’s staying?”

“No. That’s the trouble. I hung around the bus station for about an hour and then I tried to phone you and when I couldn’t I took a taxi here. I had to spend the night somewhere.”

“So you did. It’s too bad Tom didn’t think of that.”

“He probably has other things on his mind,” she said in a defensive tone. “He’s been having a terrible time.”

“Did he say so?”

“I could tell by the way he talked to me. He sounded – I don’t know – so upset.”

“Emotionally upset, or just plain scared?”

Her brow knit. “More worried than scared. But he wouldn’t say what about. He wouldn’t tell me anything that happened. I asked him if he was okay, you know, physically okay, and he said he was. So I asked him why he didn’t come home. He said on account of his parents, only he didn’t call them his parents. He called them his anti-parents. He said they could probably hardly wait to put him back in Laguna Perdida School.”

Her eyes were very dark. “I remember now what I was dreaming before you woke me up. Tommy was in that school and they wouldn’t let him out and they wouldn’t let me see him. I went around to all the doors and windows, trying to get in. All I could see was the terrible faces leering at me through the windows.”

“The faces aren’t so terrible. I was there.”

“Yes, but you weren’t locked up there. Tommy says it’s a terrible place. His parents had no right to put him there. I don’t blame him for staying away.”

“Neither do I, Stella. But, under the circumstances, he has to be brought in. You understand that, don’t you?”

“I guess I do.”

“It would be a rotten anticlimax if something happened to him now. You don’t want that.”

She shook her head.

“Then will you help me get him?”

“It’s why I came here, really. I couldn’t sic the police on him. But you’re different.”

She touched the back of my hand. “You won’t let them put him back in Laguna Perdida.”

“It won’t happen if I can possibly help it. I think I can. If Tom needs treatment, he should be able to get it as an outpatient.”

“He isn’t sick!”

“His father must have had a reason for putting him there. Something happened that Sunday, he wouldn’t tell me what.”

“It happened long before that Sunday,” she said. “His father turned against him, that’s what happened. Tommy isn’t the hairy-chested type, and he preferred music to trap-shooting and sailing and such things. So his father turned against him. It’s as simple as that.”

“Nothing ever is, but we won’t argue. If you’ll excuse me for a minute, Stella, I have to make a phone call.”

The phone was on the desk under the window. I sat down there and dialed Susanna Drew’s unlisted number. She answered on the first ring.

“Hello.”

“Lew Archer. You sound very alert for three o’clock in the morning.”

“I’ve been lying awake thinking, about you among other things and people. Somebody said – I think it was Scott Fitzgerald – something to the effect that in the real dark night of the soul it’s always three o’clock in the morning. I have a reverse twist on that. At three o’clock in the morning it’s always the real dark night of the soul.”

“The thought of me depresses you?”

“In certain contexts it does. In others, not.”