Росс Макдональд - The Far Side of the Dollar

“And my father wasn’t so bad, either,” he said without conviction.

“Who killed them, Tom?”

His face became blank and tight. It looked like a wooden mask used to fend off suffering.

“I don’t know anything about it,” he said in a monotone. “I didn’t know Carol was dead, even, till I saw the papers last night. I didn’t know Mike was dead till I saw the papers today. Next question.”

“Don’t be like that, Tom. I’m not a cop, and I’m not your enemy.”

“With the so-called parents I’ve got, who needs enemies? All my – all Captain Hillman ever wanted was a pet boy around the house, somebody to do tricks. I’m tired to doing tricks for him.”

“You should be tired, after this last trick. It was a honey of a trick.”

He gave me his first direct look, half in anger and half in fear. “I had a right to go with my real parents.”

“Maybe. We won’t argue about that. But you certainly had no right to help them extort money from your father.”

“He’s not my father.”

“I know that. Do you have to keep saying it?”

“Do you have to keep calling him my father?”

He was a difficult boy. I felt good, anyway. I had him.

“Okay,” I said. “We’ll call him Mr. X and we’ll call your mother Madam X and we’ll call you the Lost Dauphin of France.”

“That isn’t so funny.”

He was right. It wasn’t.

“Getting back to the twenty-five thousand dollars you helped to take them for, I suppose you know you’re an accomplice in a major felony.”

“I didn’t know about the money. They didn’t tell me. I don’t think Carol knew about it, either.”

“That’s hard to believe, Tom.”

“It’s true. Mike didn’t tell us. He just said he had a deal cooking.”

“If you didn’t know about the extortion, why did you ride away in the trunk of his car?”

“So I wouldn’t be seen. Mike said my dad–” he swallowed the word, with disgust “–he said that Captain Hillman had all the police looking for me, to put me back in Laguna–” He became aware of his present situation. He peered around furtively, scrambled under the wheel to the far door. I pulled him back into the middle of the seat and put an armlock on him.

“You’re staying with me, Tom, if I have to use handcuffs.”

“FUZZ!”

The jeering word came strangely from him, like a foreign word he was trying to make his own. It bothered me. Boys, like men, have to belong to something. Tom had felt betrayed by one world, the plush deceptive world of Ralph Hillman, with schools like Laguna Perdida on the underside of the weave. He had plunged blindly into another world, and now he had lost that. His mind must be desperate for a place to rest, I thought, and I wasn’t doing much of a job of providing one.

A bus came down the street. As it turned into the loading area, I caught a glimpse of passengers at the windows, travel-drugged and blare. California here we come, right back where we started from.

I relaxed my grip on Tom. “I couldn’t let you go,” I said, “even if I wanted to. You’re not stupid. Try for once to figure out how this looks to other people.”

“This?”

“The whole charade. Your running away from school – for which I certainly don’t blame you–”

“Thanks a lot.”

I disregarded his irony. “And the phony kidnapping and all the rest of it. An adopted son is just as important as a real one to his parents. Yours have been worried sick about you.”

“I bet.”

“Neither one of them gave a damn about the money, incidentally. It’s you they cared about, and care about.”

“There’s something missing,” he said.

“What?”

“The violin accompaniment.”

“You’re a hard boy to talk to, Tom.”

“My friends don’t think so.”

“What’s a friend? Somebody who lets you run wild?”

“Somebody who doesn’t want to throw me into the Black Hole of Calcutta, otherwise known as Laguna Perdida School.”

“I don’t.”

“You say you don’t. But you’re working for Captain Hillman, and he does.”

“Not any more.”

The boy shook his head. “I don’t believe you, and I don’t believe him. After a few things happen to you, you start to believe what people do, not what they say. People like the Hillmans would think that a person like Carol was a nothing, a nothing woman. But she wasn’t to me. She liked me. She treated me well. Even my real father never raised his hand to me. The only trouble we had was about the way he treated Carol.”

He had dropped his brittle sardonic front and was talking to me in a human voice. Stella chose this moment to come out of the loading area onto the sidewalk. Her faced was pinched with disappointment.

Tom caught sight of her almost as soon as I did. His eyes lit up as if she was an angel from some lost paradise. He leaned across me.

“Hey! Stell!”

She came running. I got out of the car and let her take my place beside the boy. They didn’t embrace or kiss. Perhaps their hands met briefly. I got in behind the wheel.

Stella was saying: “It feels as though you’ve been gone for ages.”

“It does to me, too.”

“You should have called me sooner.”

“I did.”

“I mean, right away.”

“I was afraid you’d– do what you did.” He jerked his chin in my direction.

“I didn’t, though. Not really. It was his idea. Anyway, you have to go home. We both do.”

“I have no home.”

“Neither have I, then. Mine’s just as bad as yours.”

“No, it isn’t.”

“Yes, it is. Anyway,” she said to clinch the argument, “you need a bath. I can smell you. And a shave.”

I glanced at his face. It had a pleased silly embarrassed expression.

The street was empty of traffic at the moment. I started the car and made a U-turn toward the south. Tom offered no objection.

Once on the freeway, in that anonymous world of rushing lights and darkness, he began to talk in his human voice to Stella.

Carol had phoned him, using his personal number, several weeks before. She wanted to arrange a meeting with him. That night, driving Ralph Hillman’s Cadillac, he picked her up at the view-point overlooking the sea near Dack’s Auto Court.

He parked in an orange grove that smelled of weddings and listened to the story of her life. Even though he’d often doubted that he belonged to the Hillmans, it was hard for him to believe that he was Carol’s son. But he was strongly drawn to her. The relationship was like an escape hatch in Captain Hillman’s tight little ship. He kept going back to Carol, and eventually he believed her. He even began to love her in a way.

“Why didn’t you tell me about her?” Stella said. “I would have liked to know her.”

“No, you wouldn’t.”

His voice was rough. “Anyway, I had to get to know her myself first. I had to get adjusted to the whole idea of my mother. And then I had to decide what to do. You see, she wanted to leave my father. He gave her a hard time, he always had. She said if she didn’t get away from him soon, she’d never be able to. She wasn’t good at standing up for herself, and she wanted my help. Besides, I think she knew he was up to something.”

“You mean the kidnapping and all?” she said.

“I think she knew it and she didn’t know it. You know how women are.”

“I know my mother,” she answered sagely.

They had forgotten me. I was the friendly chauffeur, good old graying Lew Archer, and we would go on driving like this forever through a night so dangerous that it had to feel secure. I remembered a kind of poem or parable that Susanna had quoted to me years before. A bird came in through a window at one end of a lighted hall, flew the length of the hall, and out through another window into darkness: that was the span of a human life. The headlights that rose in the distance and swooped by and fell away behind us reminded me of Susanna’s briefly lighted bird. I wished that she was with me.