Росс Макдональд - The Far Side of the Dollar

I went down the corridor where Mr. Sipe had first appeared with his light, past the closed, numbered doors, to a door at the end which was standing slightly ajar. I could hear breathing inside the dark room, the heavy sighing breathing of a man in sleep or stupor. The odor of whisky was strong.

I reached inside the door and found the light switch with my right hand. I turned it on and shifted my hand to my gun butt. There was no need. Sipe was lying on the bed, fully clothed, with his ugly nostrils glaring and his loose mouth sighing at the ceiling. He was alone.

There was hardly space for anyone else. The room had never been large, and it was jammed with stuff which looked as if it had been accumulating for decades. Cartons and packing cases, piles of rugs, magazines and newspapers, suitcases and footlockers, were heaped at the back of the room almost to the ceiling. On the visible parts of the walls were pictures of young men in boxing stance, interspersed with a few girlie pictures.

Empty whisky bottles were ranged along the wall beside the door. A half-full bottle stood by the bed where Sipe was lying. I turned the key that was in the lock of the door and took a closer look at the sleeping man.

He wasn’t just sleeping. He was out, far out and possibly far gone. If I had put a match to his lips, his breath would have ignited like an alcohol burner. Even the front of his shirt seemed to be saturated with whisky, as though he’d poured it over himself in one last wild libation before he passed out.

His gun was stuck in the greasy waistband of his trousers. I transferred it to my jacket pocket before I tried to rouse him. He wouldn’t wake up. I shook him. He was inert as a side of beef, and his big head rolled loosely on the pillow. I slapped his pitted red cheeks. He didn’t even groan.

I went into the adjoining bathroom – it was also a kind of kitchen fitted out with an electric plate and a percolator that smelled of burned coffee, and filled the percolator with cold water from the bathtub faucet. This I poured over Sipe’s head and face, being careful not to drown him. He didn’t wake up.

I was getting a little worried, not so much about Sipe as about the possibility that he might never be able to give me his story. There was no way of telling how many of the bottles in the room had been emptied recently. I felt his pulse: laboriously slow. I lifted one of his eyelids. It was like looking down into a red oyster.

I had noticed that the bathroom was one of those with two doors, serving two rooms, that you find in older hotels. I went through it into the adjoining bedroom and shone my light around. It was a room similar in shape and size to the other, but almost bare. A brass double bed with a single blanket covering the mattress was just about the only furniture. The blanket lay in the tumbled folds that a man, or a boy, leaves behind when he gets up.

Hung over the head of the bed, like a limp truncated shadow of a boy, was a black sweater. It was a knitted sweater, and it had a raveled sleeve. Where the yarn was snarled and broken I could see traces of light-colored grease, the kind they use on the locks of automobile trunks. In the wastebasket I found several cardboard baskets containing the remains of hamburgers and french frieds.

My heart was beating in my ears. The sweater was pretty good physical evidence that Stella had not been conned. Tom was alive.

I found Sipe’s keys and locked him in his room and went through every other room in the building. There were nearly a hundred guest and service rooms, and it took a long time. I felt like an archaeologist exploring the interior of a pyramid. The Barcelona’s palmy days seemed that long ago.

All I got for my efforts was a noseful of dust. If Tom was in the building, he was hiding. I had a feeling that he wasn’t there, that he had left the Barcelona for good. Anybody would if he had the chance.

I went back across the highway to Daly’s station. My flashlight found a notice pasted to the lower right-hand corner of the front door. “In case of emergency call owner,” with Daly’s home number. I called it from the outside booth, and after a while got an answer: “Daly here.”

“Lew Archer. I’m the detective who was looking for Harold Harley.”

“This is a heck of a time to be looking for anybody.”

“I found Harley, thanks to you. Now I need your help in some more important business.”

“What’s the business?”

“I’ll tell you when you get here. I’m at your station.”

Daly had the habit of serviceability. “Okay. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

I waited for him in my car, trying to put the case together in my mind. It was fairly clear that Sipe and Mike Harley had been working together, and had used the Barcelona as a hideout. It didn’t look as if Tom had been a prisoner; more likely a willing guest, as Harley had said from the start. Even with Laguna Perdida School in the background, it was hard to figure out why a boy would do this to his parents and himself.

Daly came off the highway with a flourish and parked his pickup beside me. He got out and slammed the door, which had his name on it. He gave me a frowzy sardonic pre-dawn look.

“What’s on your mind, Mr. Archer?”

“Get in. I’ll show you a picture.”

He climbed in beside me. I turned on the dome light and got out Tom’s photograph. Every time I looked at it it had changed, gathering ambiguities on the mouth and in the eyes.

I put it in Daly’s oil-grained hands. “Have you seen him?”

“Yeah. I have. I saw him two or three times over the last couple of days. He made some telephone calls from the booth there. He made one yesterday afternoon.”

“What time?”

“I didn’t notice, I was busy. It was along toward the end of the afternoon. Then I saw him again last night waiting for the bus.”

He pointed down the road toward Santa Monica. “The bus stops at the intersection if you flag it down. Otherwise it don’t.”

“Which bus is that?”

“Any of the intercity buses, expecting the express ones.”

“Did you see him get on a bus?”

“No. I was getting ready to close up. Next time I looked he was gone.”

“What time was this?”

“Around eight-thirty last night.”

“What was he wearing?”

“White shirt, dark slacks.”

“What made you interested enough to watch him?”

Daly fidgeted. “I dunno. I didn’t watch him exactly. I saw him come out of the grounds of the Barcelona and I wondered what he was doing there, naturally. I’d hate to see such a nice-looking boy mixed up with a man like Sipe.”

He glanced at the photograph and handed it back to me, as if to relieve himself of the responsibility of explaining Tom.

“What’s the matter with Sipe?”

“What isn’t? I’ve got boys of my own, and I hate to see a man like Sipe teaching the boys to drink and other things. He ought to be in jail, if you want my opinion.”

“I agree. Let’s put him there.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I’m serious, Ben. Right now Sipe is in his hotel room, passed out. He probably won’t wake up for a long time. Just in case he does, will you stay here and watch for him to come out?”

“What do I do if he comes out?”

“Call the police and tell them to arrest him.”

“I can’t do that,” he said uneasily. “I know he’s a bad actor, but I got nothing definite to go on.”

“I have. If you’re forced to call the police, tell them Sipe is wanted in Pacific Point on suspicion of kidnapping. But don’t call them unless you have to. Sipe is my best witness, and once he’s arrested I’ll never see him again.”

“Where are you going?”

“To see if I can trace the boy.”