Росс Макдональд - The Far Side of the Dollar

His eyes brightened. “Is he the one that’s been in all the papers? What’s his name? Hillman?”

“He’s the one.”

“I should have recognized him. I dunno, I don’t pay too much attention to people’s faces. But I can tell you what kind of a car they drive.”

“Does Sipe have a car?”

“Yeah. It’s a ’53 Ford with a cracked engine. I put some goop in it for him, but it’s due to die any day.”

Before I left, I asked Daly if he had seen anyone else around the hotel. He had, and he remembered. Mike Harley had been there Monday morning, driving the car with the Idaho license. I guessed that Tom had been riding in the trunk.

“And just last night,” he said, “there was this other young fellow driving a brand-new Chevvy. I think he had a girl with him, or maybe a smaller fellow. I was just closed up, and my bright lights were off.”

“Did you get a good look at the driver?”

“Not so good, no. I think he was dark-haired, a nice-looking boy. What he was doing with that crumb-bum–” Shaking his head some more, Ben started to get out of my car. He froze in mid-action: “Come to think of it, what’s the Hillman boy been doing walking around? I thought he was a prisoner and everybody in Southern California was looking for him.”

“We are.”

It took me a couple of hours, with the help of several bus company employees, to sort out the driver who had picked Tom up last night. His name was Albertson and he lived far out on La Cienaga in an apartment over a bakery. The sweet yeasty smell of freshly made bread permeated his small front room.

It was still very early in the morning. Albertson had pulled on trousers over his pajamas. He was a square-shouldered man of about forty, with alert eyes. He nodded briskly over the picture: “Yessir. I remember him. He got on my bus at the Barcelona intersection and bought a ticket into Santa Monica. He didn’t get off at Santa Monica, though.”

“Why not?”

He rubbed his heavily bearded chin. The sound rasped on my nerves. “Would he be wanted for something?” Albertson said.

“He would.”

“That’s what I thought at the time. He started to get off and then he saw somebody inside the station and the kid went back to his seat. I got off for a rest stop and it turned out there was a cop inside. When I came back the boy was still on the bus. I told him this was as far as his fare would take him. So he asked me to sell him a ticket to LA I was all set to go and I didn’t make an issue. If the kid was in trouble, it wasn’t up to me to turn him in. I’ve been in trouble myself. Did I do wrong?”

“You’ll find out on Judgment Day.”

He smiled. “That’s a long time to wait. What’s the pitch on the kid?”

“Read it in the papers, Mr. Albertson. Did he ride all the way downtown?”

“Yeah. I’m sure he did. He was one of the last ones to get off the bus.”

I went downtown and did some bird-dogging in and around the bus station. Nobody remembered seeing the boy. Of course the wrong people were on duty at this time in the morning. I’d stand a better chance if I tried again in the evening. And it was time I got back to Otto Sipe.

Ben Daly said he hadn’t come out of the hotel. But when we went to Sipe’s room the door was standing open and he was gone. Before he left he had finished the bottle of whisky by his bed.

“He must have had a master key, Ben. Is there any way out of here except the front?”

“No sir. He has to be on the grounds some place.”

We went around to the back of the sprawling building, past a dry swimming pool with a drift of brown leaves in the deep end. Under the raw bluff which rose a couple of hundred feet behind the hotel were the employees’ dormitories, garages, and other outbuildings. The two rear wings of the hotel contained a formal garden whose clipped shrubs and box hedges were growing back into natural shapes. Swaying on the topmost spray of a blue plumbago bush, a mockingbird was scolding like a jay.

I stood still and made a silencing gesture to Daly. Someone was digging on the far side of the bush. I could see some of his movements and hear the scrape of the spade, the thump of earth. I took out the gun and showed myself.

Otto Sipe looked up from his work. He was standing in a shallow hole about five feet long and two feet wide. There was dirt on his clothes. His face was muddy with sweat.

In the grass beside the hole a man in a gray jacket was lying on his back. The striped handle of a knife protruded from his chest. The man looked like Mike Harley, and he lay as if the knife had nailed him permanently to the earth.

“What are you doing, Otto?”

“Planting petunias.”

He bared his teeth in a doggish grin. The man seemed to be in that detached state of drunkenness where everything appears surreal or funny.

“Planting dead men, you mean.”

He turned and looked at Harley’s body as if it had just fallen from the sky. “Did he come with you?”

“You know who he is. You and Mike have been buddies ever since he left Pocatello with you in the early forties.”

“All right, I got a right to give a buddy a decent burial. You just can’t leave them lying around in the open for the vultures.”

“The only vultures I see around here are human ones. Did you kill him?”

“Naw. Why would I kill my buddy?”

“Who did?”

Leaning on his spade, he gave me a queer cunning look.

“Where’s Tom Hillman, Otto?”

“I’m gonna save my talk for when it counts.”

I turned to Ben Daly. “Can you handle a gun?”

“Hell no, I was only at Guadal.”

“Hold this on him.”

I handed him my revolver and went to look at Harley. His face when I touched it was cold as the night had been. This and the advanced coagulation of the blood that stained his shirt front told me he had been dead for many hours, probably all night.

I didn’t try to pull the knife out of his ribs. I examined it closely without touching it. The handle was padded with rubber, striped black and white, and molded to fit the hand. It looked new and fairly expensive.

The knife was the only thing of any value that had attached itself to Mike Harley. I went through his pockets and found the stub of a Las Vegas to Los Angeles plane ticket issued the day before, and three dollars and forty-two cents.

Ben Daly let out a yell. Several things happened at once. At the edge of my vision metal flashed and the mockingbird flew up out of the bush. The gun went off. A gash opened in the side of Daly’s head where Otto Sipe had hit him with the spade. Otto Sipe’s face became contorted. He clutched at his abdomen and fell forward, with the lower part of his body in the grave.

Ben Daly said: “I didn’t mean to shoot him. The gun went off when he swung the spade at me. After the war I never wanted to shoot anything.”

The gash in the side of his head was beginning to bleed. I tied my handkerchief around it and told him to go and call the police and an ambulance. He ran. He was surprisingly light on his feet for a man of middle age.

I was feeling surprisingly heavy on mine. I went to Sipe and turned him onto his back and opened his clothes. The wound in his belly was just below the umbilicus. It wasn’t bleeding much, externally, but he must have been bleeding inside. The life was draining visibly from his face.

It was Archer I mourned for. It had been a hard three days. All I had to show for them was a dead man and a man who was probably dying. The fact that the bullet in Sipe had come from my gun made it worse.

Compunction didn’t prevent me from going through Sipe’s pockets. His wallet was fat with bills, all of them twenties. But his share of the Hillman payoff wasn’t going to do him any good. He was dead before the ambulance came shrieking down the highway.