Росс Макдональд - The Far Side of the Dollar

A LOT OF talking was done, some on the scene and some in the sheriff’s office. With my support, and a phone call from Lieutenant Bastian, and the fairly nasty cut in the side of his head, Ben was able to convince the sheriff’s and the DA’s men that he had committed justifiable homicide. But they weren’t happy about it. Neither was I. I had let him kill my witness.

There was still another witness, if she would talk. By the middle of the morning I was back at the door of Susanna Drew’s apartment. Stella said through the door: “Who is it, please?”

“Lew Archer.”

She let me in. The girl had bluish patches under her eyes, as if their color had run. There was hardly any other color in her face.

“You look scared,” I said. “Has anything happened?”

“No. It’s one of the things that scares me. And I have to call my parents and I don’t want to. They’ll make me go home.”

“You have to go home.”

“No.”

“Yes. Think of them for a minute. You’re putting them through a bad time for no good reason.”

“But I do have a good reason. I want to try and meet Tommy again tonight. He said if he didn’t make it last night he’d be at the bus station tonight.”

“What time?”

“The same time. Nine o’clock.”

“I’ll meet him for you.”

She didn’t argue, but her look was evasive.

“Where’s Miss Drew, Stella?”

“She went out for breakfast. I was still in bed, and she left me a note. She said she’d be back soon, but she’s been gone for at least two hours.”

She clenched her fists and rapped her knuckles together in front of her. “I’m worried.”

“About Susanna Drew?”

“About everything. About me. Things keep getting worse. I keep expecting it to end, but it keeps getting worse. I’m changing, too. There’s hardly anybody I like any more.”

“The thing will end, Stella, and you’ll change back.”

“Will I? It doesn’t feel like a reversible change. I don’t see how Tommy and I are ever going to be happy.”

“Survival is the main thing.”

It was a hard saying to offer a young girl. “Happiness come in fits and snatches. I’m having more of it as I get older. The teens were my worst time.”

“Really?”

Her brow puckered. “Do you mind if I ask you a personal question, Mr. Archer?”

“Go ahead.”

“Are you interested in Miss Drew? You know what I mean. Seriously.”

“I think I am. Why?”

“I don’t know whether I should tell you this or not. She went out for breakfast with another man.”

“That’s legitimate.”

“I don’t know. I didn’t actually see him but I heard his voice and I’m very good on voices. I think it was a married man.”

“How can you tell that from a man’s voice?”

“It was Tommy’s father,” she said. “Mr. Hillman.”

I sat down. For a minute I couldn’t think of anything to say. The African masks on the sunlit wall seemed to be making faces at me.

Stella approached me with an anxious expression. “Shouldn’t I have told you? Ordinarily I’m not a tattletale. I feel like a spy in her house.”

“You should have told me. But don’t tell anyone else, please.”

“I won’t.”

Having passed the information on to me, she seemed relieved.

“Did the two of them seem friendly, Stella?”

“Not exactly. I didn’t see them together. I stayed in my room because I didn’t want him to see me. She wasn’t glad to have him come here, I could tell. But they did sound kind of intimate.”

“Just what do you mean by ‘intimate’?”

She thought about her answer. “It was something about the way they talked, as if they were used to talking back and forth. There wasn’t any politeness or formality.”

“What did they say to each other?”

“Do you want me to try and tell you word for word?”

“Exactly, from the moment he came to the door.”

“I didn’t hear all of it. Anyway, when he came in, she said: ‘I thought you had more discretion than this, Ralph.’ She called him Ralph. He said: ‘Don’t give me that. The situation is getting desperate.’ I don’t know what he meant by that.”

“What do you think he meant?”

“Tommy and all, but there may have been more to it. They didn’t say. He said: ‘I thought I could expect a little sympathy from you.’ She said she was all out of sympathy, and he said she was a hard woman and then he did something – I think he tried to kiss her – and she said: ‘Don’t do that!’ ”

“Did she sound angry?”

Stella assumed a listening attitude and looked at the high ceiling. “Not so very. Just not interested. He said: ‘You don’t seem to like me very much.’ She said that the question was a complicated one and she didn’t think now was the time to go into it, especially with somebody in the guest room, meaning me. He said: ‘Why didn’t you say so in the first place? Is it a man?’ After that they lowered their voices. I don’t know what she told him. They went out for breakfast in a few minutes.”

“You have a very good memory,” I said.

She nodded, without self-consciousness. “It helps me in school, but in other ways it isn’t so fabulous. I remember all the bad things along with the good things.”

“And the conversation you heard this morning was one of the bad things?”

“Yes, it was. It frightened me. I don’t know why.”

It frightened me, too, to learn that Hillman might have been the faceless man with Susanna when she was twenty. In different degrees I cared about them both. They were people with enough feeling to be hurt, and enough complexity to do wrong. Susanna I cared about in ways I hadn’t even begun to explore.

Now the case was taking hold of her skirt like the cogs of an automated machine that nobody knew how to stop. I have to admit that I wouldn’t have stopped it even if I knew how. Which is the peculiar hell of being a pro.

“Let’s see the note she left you.”

Stella fetched it from the kitchen, a penciled note scrawled on an interoffice memo form:

Dear Stella: I am going out for breakfast and will be back soon. Help yourself to the contents of the refrig. S. Drew.

“Did you have anything to eat?” I said to Stella.

“I drank a glass of milk.”

“And a hamburger last night for dinner. No wonder you look pinched. Come on, I’ll take you out for breakfast. It’s the going thing.”

“All right. Thank you. But then what?”

“I drive you home.”

She turned and walked to the sliding glass doors that opened onto the patio, as far away in the room as she could get from me. A little wind was blowing, and I could hear it rustling in the fronds of a miniature palm. Stella turned back to me decisively, as if the wind and the sunlight had influenced her through the glass.

“I guess I have to go home. I can’t go on scaring my mother.”

“Good girl. Now call her and tell her you’re on your way.”

She considered my suggestion, standing in the sunlight with her head down, the white straight part of her hair bisecting her brown head. “I will if you won’t listen.”

“How will I know you’ve done it?”

“I never lied to you yet,” she said with feeling. “That’s because you don’t tell lies to me. Not even for my own good.”

She produced her first smile of the morning.

I think I produced mine. It had been a bad morning.

I immured myself in a large elaborate bathroom with fuzzy blue carpeting and did some washing, ritual and otherwise. I found a safety razor among the cosmetics and sleeping pills in the medicine cabinet, and used it to shave with. I was planning an important interview, a series of them if I could set them up.