Росс Макдональд - The Far Side of the Dollar

“Stop talking like a phony.”

She looked up at me with hurt dark eyes. “Nothing I say is right. You’re mad at me. Maybe I shouldn’t have left Stella by herself, but she was still sleeping and I had to go to work. Anyway, she got home all right. Her father called, to thank me, just before I left the office.”

“To thank you?”

“And to cross-examine me about you and a few other things. Stella seems to have left home again. Mr. Carlson asked me to get in touch with him if she comes here. Should I?”

“I don’t care. Stella isn’t the problem.”

“And I am?”

“You’re part of it. You didn’t leave Stella this morning because you had to go to work. You had breakfast with Ralph Hillman, and you ought to know that I know it.”

“It was in a public place,” she said irrelevantly.

“That’s not the point. I wouldn’t care if it was breakfast in bed. The point is you tried to slur over the fact, and it’s a damned important fact.”

The hurt in her eyes tried to erupt into anger, but didn’t quite succeed. Anger was just another evasion, and she probably knew that she was coming to the end of her evasions. She finished her drink and said in a very poignant female voice: “Do you mean important to you personally, or for other reasons?”

“Both. I talked to Mrs. Hillman today. Actually she did most of the talking.”

“About Ralph and me?”

“Yes. It wasn’t a very pleasant conversation, for either of us. I’d rather have heard it from you.”

She averted her face. Her black head absorbed the light almost completely. It was like looking into a small head-shaped area of almost total darkness.

“It’s a passage in my life that I’m not proud of.”

“Because he was so much older?”

“That’s one reason. Also, now that I’m older myself, I know how wretchedly mean it is to try and steal another woman’s husband.”

“Then why go on doing it?”

“I’m not!” she cried in resentment. “It was over almost as soon as it started. If Mrs. Hillman thinks otherwise, she’s imagining things.”

“I’m the one who thinks otherwise,” I said. “You had breakfast with him this morning. You had a phone call from him the other day, which you refused to discuss.”

Slowly she turned and looked up at my face. “But it doesn’t mean anything. I didn’t ask him to phone me. I only went out with him this morning because he was desperate to talk to someone and I didn’t want to disturb Stella. Also, if you want the truth, so he couldn’t make a pass at me.”

“Does he go in rather heavily for that?”

“I don’t know. I hadn’t seen him in about eighteen years. Honestly. I was appalled by the change in him. He was in a bad way this morning. He’d been drinking, and he said he’d been up all night, wandering around Los Angeles, searching for his son.”

“I’ve been doing a little searching myself, but nobody goes out to breakfast with me and holds my hand.”

“Are you really jealous of him, Lew? You can’t be. He’s old. He’s a broken-down old man.”

“You’re protesting too much.”

“I mean it, though. I had an enormous sense of revulsion this morning. Not just against Ralph Hillman. Against my whole misguided little life.”

She looked around the room as if she perceived the shabbiness I had seen. “I’m liable to spill over into my autobiography at any moment.”

“That’s what I’ve been waiting for, Susanna. How did you meet him?”

“Make me another drink.”

I made it and brought it to her. “When and how did you meet him?”

“It was in March of 1945, when I was working at Warner’s. A group of Navy officers came out to the studio to see a preview of a war movie. They were planning a party afterwards, and I went along. Ralph got me drunk and took me to the Barcelona Hotel, where he introduced me to the stolen delights of illicit romance. It was my first time on both counts. First time drunk, first time bedded.”

Her voice was harsh. “If you wouldn’t stand over me, Lew, it would be easier.”

I pulled up a hassock to her feet. “But it didn’t go on, you say?”

“It went on for a few weeks. I’ll be honest with you. I was in love with Ralph. He was handsome and brave and all the other things.”

“And married.”

“That’s why I quit him,” she said, “essentially Mrs. Hillman. Elaine Hillman got wind of the affair and came to my apartment in Burbank. We had quite a scene. I don’t know what would have happened if Carol hadn’t been there. But she got the two of us quieted down, and even talking sensibly to each other.”

She paused, and added elegiacally: “Carol had troubles of her own, but she was always good at easing situations.”

“What was Carol doing in that situation?”

“She was living with me, didn’t I tell you that? I took her into my home. Anyway, Carol sat there like a little doll while Elaine Hillman laid out for me in detail just what I was doing to her and her marriage. The ugliness of it. I saw I couldn’t go on doing it to her. I told her so, and she was satisfied. She’s quite an impressive woman, you know, at least she was then.”

“She still is, when you get under the surface. And Ralph Hillman is an impressive man.”

“He was in those days, anyway.”

I said to test her honesty: “Didn’t you have any other reason for dropping him, besides Elaine Hillman’s visit?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” she said, failing the honesty test, or perhaps the memory test.

“How did Elaine Hillman find out about you?”

“Oh. That.”

The shame that lay beneath her knowledge of herself came up into her face and took possession of it. She whispered: “Mrs. Hillman told you, I suppose?”

“She mentioned a picture.”

“Did she show it to you?”

“She’s too much of a lady.”

“That was a nasty crack!”

“It wasn’t intended to be. You’re getting paranoid.”

“Yes, Doctor. Shall I stretch out on this convenient couch and tell you a dream?”

“I can think of better uses for a couch.”

“Not now,” she said quickly.

“No. Not now.”

But in the darkest part of our transaction we had reached a point of intimacy, understanding at least. “I’m sorry I have to drag all this stuff out.”

“I know. I know that much about you. I also know you haven’t finished.”

“Who took the picture? Otto Sipe?”

“He was there. I heard his voice.”

“You didn’t see him?”

“I hid my face,” she said. “A flashbulb popped. It was like reality exploding.”

She passed her hand over her eyes. “I think it was another man in the doorway who took the picture.”

“Harold Harley?”

“It must have been. I didn’t see him.”

“What was the date?”

“It’s in my memory book. April 14, 1945. Why does it matter?”

“Because you can’t explode reality. Life hangs together in one piece. Everything is connected with everything else. The problem is to find the connections.”

She said with some irony: “That’s your mission in life, isn’t it? You’re not interested in people, you’re only interested in the connections between them. Like a–” she searched for an insulting word “–a plumber.”

I laughed at her. She smiled a little. Her eyes remained somber.

“There’s another connection we have to go into,” I said. “This one involves the telephone, not the plumbing.”

“You mean Ralph’s call the other day.”

“Yes. He wanted you to keep quiet about something. What was it?”

She squirmed a little, and gathered her feet under her. “I don’t want to get him into trouble. I owe him that much.”