Росс Макдональд - The Far Side of the Dollar

“Spare me the warmed-over sentiment. This is for real.”

“You needn’t sound so insulting.”

“I apologize. Now let’s have it.”

“Well, he knew you had seen me, and he said we had to keep our stories straight. It seems there was a discrepancy in the story he told you. He told you he hadn’t met Carol, but actually he had. After Mike Harley was arrested, she made an appeal to him and he did what he could. I wasn’t to tell you about his interest in Carol.”

“He was interested in Carol?”

“Not in the way you mean,” she said with a lift of her head. “I was his girl. He simply didn’t like the idea of leaving a child bride like Carol alone in the Barcelona Hotel. He asked me to take her under my wing. My slightly broken wing. Which I did, as you know.”

“It all sounds very innocent.”

“It was. I swear it. Besides, I liked Carol, I loved her, that summer in Burbank. I felt as if the baby in her womb belonged to both of us.”

“Have you ever had a child?”

She shook her head rather sadly. “I never will have now. I was sure I was pregnant once, that very spring we’ve been talking about, but the doctor said it was false, caused by wistful thinking.”

“Was Carol seeing a doctor when she lived with you?”

“Yes, I made her go. She went to the same doctor, actually. Weintraub, his name was.”

“Did he deliver her baby?”

“I wouldn’t know. She’d already left me, remember, and gone off with Mike Harley. And I didn’t go back to Dr. Weintraub on account of the unpleasant associations.”

“Was he unpleasant to you?”

“I mean the association with Ralph Hillman. Ralph sent me to Dr. Weintraub. I think they were buddies in the Navy.”

Dr. Weintraub’s plump face came into my mind. At the same time I remembered where I had seen a younger version of it, stripped of excess flesh, that very day. Weintraub was a member of the group on the flight deck, in the picture hanging on Hillman’s library wall.

“It’s funny,” Susanna was saying, “how a name you haven’t heard for seventeen or eighteen years will crop up, and then a couple of hours or a couple of days later, it will crop up again. Like Weintraub.”

“Has the name been cropping up in other contexts?”

“Just this afternoon at the office. I had a rather peculiar caller whom I meant to tell you about, but all these other matters pushed him out of my mind. He was interested in Dr. Weintraub, too.”

“Who was he?”

“He didn’t want to say. When I pressed him, he said his name was Jackman.”

“Sam Jackman?”

“He didn’t mention his first name.”

“Sam Jackman is a middle-aged Negro with very light skin who looks and talks like a jazz musician on his uppers, which he is.”

“This boy seemed to be on his uppers, all right, but he certainly isn’t Sam’s. Maybe he’s Sam son. He can’t be more than eighteen or nineteen.”

“Describe him.”

“Thin-faced, very good features, very intense dark eyes, so intense he scared me a little. He seemed intelligent, but he was too excited to make much sense.”

“What was he excited about?”

I said with a mounting excitement of my own.

“Carol’s death, I think. He didn’t refer to it directly, but he asked me if I had known Carol in 1945. Apparently he’d been all the way out to Burbank trying to find me. He came across an old secretary at Warner’s whom I still keep in touch with, and used her name to get past my secretary: He wanted to know what I could tell him about the Harley baby, and when I couldn’t tell him anything he asked me what doctor Carol had gone to. I dredged up Weintraub’s name – Elijah Weintraub isn’t exactly a forgettable name – and it satisfied him. I was quite relieved to get rid of him.”

“I’m sorry you did.”

She looked at me curiously. “Do you suppose he could be the Harley baby himself?”

I didn’t answer her. I got out my collection of photographs and shuffled them. There was an electric tremor in my hands, as if time was short-circuiting through me.

Susanna whispered fearfully: “He isn’t dead, is he, Lew? I couldn’t bear to look at another dead picture.”

“He’s alive. At least, I hope he is.”

I showed her Tom Hillman’s face. She said: “That’s the boy I talked to. But he’s very much the worse for wear now. Is he the Harley baby?”

“I think so. He’s also the baby that Ralph and Elaine Hillman adopted through Dr. Weintraub. Did you get the impression that he was on his way to see Weintraub?”

“Yes. I did.”

She was getting excited, too. “It’s like an ancient identity myth. He’s searching for his lost parentage.”

“The hell of it is, both of his parents are dead. What time did you see him?”

“Around four o’clock.”

It was nearly six now. I went to the phone and called Weintraub’s office. His answering service said it was closed for the night. The switchboard girl wouldn’t give me Weintraub’s home address or his unlisted number, and neither would the manager of the answering service. I had to settle for leaving my name and Susanna’s number and waiting for Weintraub to call me, if he was willing.

An hour went by. Susanna broiled me a steak, and chewed unhungrily on a piece of it. We sat at a marble table in the patio and she told me all about identity myths and how they grew. Oedipus. Hamlet. Stephen Dedalus. Her father had taught courses in such subjects. It passed the time, but it didn’t relieve my anxiety for the boy. Hamlet came to a bloody end. Oedipus killed his father and married his mother, and then blinded himself.

“Thomas Harley,” I said aloud. “Thomas Harley Hillman Jackman. He knew he wasn’t the Hillmans’ son. He thought he was a changeling.”

“You get that in the myths, too.”

“I’m talking about real life. He turned on his foster parents and went for his real parents. It’s too bloody bad they had to be the Harleys.”

“You’re very certain that he is the Harley child.”

“It fits in with everything I know about him. Incidentally, it explains why Ralph Hillman tried to hush up the fact that he’d taken an interest in Carol. He didn’t want the facts of the adoption to come out.”

“Why, though?”

“He’s kept it a secret all these years, even from Tom. He seems to be a little crazy on the subject.”

“I got that impression this morning.”

She leaned across the corner of the table and touched my fingers. “Lew? You don’t think he went off his rocker and murdered Carol himself”

“It’s a possibility, but a remote one. What was on his mind at breakfast?”

“Him, mostly. He felt his life was collapsing around his ears. He thought I might be interested in helping him to pick up the pieces. After eighteen years he was offering me my second big break.”

Her scorn touched herself as well as Hillman.

“I don’t quite understand.”

“He asked me to marry him, Lew. I suppose that’s in line with contemporary mores. You get your future set up ahead of time, before you terminate your present marriage.”

“I don’t like that word ‘terminate’. Did he say what he intended to do with Elaine?”

“No.”

She looked quite pale and haunted.

“I hope divorce was all he had in mind. What was your answer?”

“My answer?”

“Your response to his proposal.”

“Oh. I told him I was waiting for a better offer.”

Her dark meaningful eyes were on my face. I sat there trying to frame a balanced answer. The telephone rang inside before I had a chance to deliver it.

I went in through the door we had left open and picked up the receiver. “Archer speaking.”