Росс Макдональд - The Far Side of the Dollar

“You’re talking in riddles, Sphinx.”

“I mean to be, Oedipus. But you’re not the source of my depression. That goes back a long way.”

“Do you want to tell me about it?”

“Another time, doctor.”

Her footwork was very skittish. “You didn’t call me at this hour for snatches of autobiography.”

“No, though I’d still like to know who that telephone call was from the other day.”

“And that’s why you called me?”

There was disappointment in her voice, ready to turn into anger.

“It isn’t why I called you. I need your help.”

“Really?”

She sounded surprised, and rather pleased. But she said guardedly: “You mean by telling you all I know and like that?”

“We don’t have time. I think this case is breaking. Anyway I have to make a move, now. A very nice high-school girl named Stella has turned up on my doorstep.”

I was speaking to the girl in the room as well as to the woman on the line; as I did so, I realized that they were rapidly becoming my favorite girl and woman. “I need a safe place to keep her for the rest of the night.”

“I’m not that safe.”

A rough note in her voice suggested that she meant it.

Stella said quickly behind me: “I could stay here.”

“She can’t stay here. Her parents would probably try to hang a child-stealing rap on me.”

“Are you serious?”

“The situation is serious, yes.”

“All right. Where do you live?”

“Stella and I will come there. We’re less than half an hour from you at this time of night.”

Stella said when I hung up: “You didn’t have to do it behind my back.”

“I did it right in front of your face. And I don’t have time to argue.”

To underline the urgency I took off my jacket, got my gun and its harness out of the drawer, and put it on in front of her. She watched me with wide eyes. The ugly ritual didn’t quite silence her.

“But I didn’t want to meet anybody tonight.”

“You’ll like Susanna Drew. She’s very stylish and hep.”

“But I never do like people when adults tell me I will.”

After the big effort of the night, she was relapsing into childishness. I said, to buck her up: “Forget your war with the adults. You’re going to be an adult pretty soon yourself. Then who will you have to blame for everything?”

“That isn’t fair.”

It wasn’t, but it held her all the way to the apartment house on Beverly Glen. Susanna came to the door in silk pajamas, not the kind anyone slept in. Her hair was brushed. She hadn’t bothered with makeup. Her face was extraordinarily and nakedly handsome, with eyes as real and dark as any night.

“Come in, Lew. It’s nice to see you, Stella. I’m Susanna. I have a bed made up for you upstairs.”

She indicated the indoor balcony which hung halfway up the wall of the big central studio, and on which an upstairs room opened. “Do you want something to eat?”

“No, thank you,” Stella said. “I had a hamburger at the bus station.”

“I’ll be glad to make you a sandwich.”

“No. Really. I’m not hungry.”

The girl looked pale and a little sick.

“Would you like to go to bed then?”

“I have no choice.”

Stella heard herself, and added: “That was rude, wasn’t it? I didn’t mean it to be. It’s awfully kind of you to take me in. It was Mr. Archer who gave me no choice.”

“I had no choice, either,” I said. “What would you do if you had one?”

“I’d be with Tommy, wherever he is.”

Her mouth began to work, and so did the delicate flesh around her eyes and mouth. The mask of a crying child seemed to be struggling for possession of her face. She ran away from it, or from our eyes, up the circular stairs to the balcony.

Susanna called after her before she closed the door. “Pajamas on the bed, new toothbrush in the bathroom.”

“You’re an efficient hostess,” I said.

“Thank you. Have a drink before you go.”

“It wouldn’t do anything for me.”

“Do you want to go into where you’re going and what you have to do?”

“I’m on my way to the Barcelona Hotel, but I keep running into detours.”

She reacted more sharply than she had any apparent reason to. “Is that what I am, a detour?”

“Stella was the detour. You’re the United States Cavalry.”

“I love your imagery.”

She made a face. “What on earth are you planning to do at the old Barcelona? Isn’t it closed down?”

“There’s at least one man living there, a watchman who used to be the hotel detective, named Otto Sipe.”

“Good Lord, I think I know him. Is he a big red-faced character with a whisky breath?”

“That’s probably the man. How do you happen to know him?”

She hesitated before she answered, in a careful voice: “I sort of frequented the Barcelona at one time, way back at the end of the war. That was where I met Carol.”

“And Mr. Sipe.”

“And Mr. Sipe.”

She wouldn’t tell me any more.

“You have no right to cross-question me,” she said finally. “Leave me alone.”

“I’ll be glad to.”

She followed me to the door. “Don’t leave on that note. Please. I’m not holding back for the fun of it. Why do you think I’ve been lying awake all night?”

“Guilt?”

“Nonsense. I’m not ashamed of anything.”

But there was shame in her eyes, deeper than her knowledge of herself. “Anyway, the little I know can’t be of any importance.”

“You’re not being fair. You’re trying to use my personal feeling for you–”

“I didn’t know it existed. If it does, I ought to have a right to use it any way I need to.”

“You don’t have that right, though. My privacy is a very precious thing to me, and you have no right to violate it.”

“Even to save a life?”

Stella opened her door and came out on the balcony. She looked like a young, pajamaed saint in a very large niche.

“If you adults,” she said, “will lower your voices a few decibels, it might be possible to get a little sleep.”

“Sorry,” I said to both of them.

Stella retreated. Susanna said: “Whose life is in danger, Lew?”

“Tom Hillman’s for one. Possibly others, including mine.”

She touched the front of my jacket. “You’re wearing a shoulder holster. Is Otto Sipe one of the kidnappers?”

I countered with a question: “Was he a man in your life?”

She was offended. “Of course not. Go away now.”

She pushed me out. “Take care.”

The night air was chilly on my face.

TRAFFIC WAS SPARSE on the coastal highway. Occasional night-crawling trucks went by, blazing with red and yellow lights. This stretch of highway was an ugly oil-stained place, fouled by petroleum fumes and rubbed barren by tires. Even the sea below it had a used-dishwater odor.

Ben Daly’s service station was dark, except for an inside bulb left on to discourage burglars. I left my car in his lot, beside an outside telephone booth, and crossed the highway to the Barcelona Hotel.

It was as dead as Nineveh. In the gardens behind the main building a mockingbird tried a few throbbing notes, like a tiny heart of sound attempting to beat, and then subsided. The intermittent mechanical movement of the highway was the only life in the inert black night.

I went up to the front door where the bankruptcy notice was posted and knocked on the glass with my flashlight. I knocked repeatedly, and got no answer. I was about to punch out a pane of glass and let myself in. Then I noticed that the door was unlocked. It opened under my hand.

I entered the lobby, jostling a couple of ghosts. They were Susanna, twenty years old, and a man without a face. I told them to get the hell out of my way.