Росс Макдональд - The Far Side of the Dollar

“I’ve talked to the man.”

“Who authorized you to? I’m not paying you to gather evidence against me.”

I said, rather wearily: “Couldn’t we forget about your wonderful money for a while, and just sit here and talk like a couple of human beings? A couple of human beings in a bind?”

He considered this. Eventually he said: “You’re not in a bind. I am.”

“Tell me about it. Unless you actually did commit those murders. In which case you should tell your lawyer and nobody else.”

“I didn’t. I almost wish I had.”

He sat down across from me, slumping forward a little, with his arms resting on the tabletop. “I admit I bought the knife. I don’t intend to admit it to anyone else. Botkin will have to be persuaded to change his story.”

“How?”

“He can’t make anything out of that store of his. I ought to know, my father owned one like it in South Boston. I can give Botkin enough money to retire to Mexico.”

I was a bit appalled, not so much by the suggestion of crude subornation – I’d often heard it before – as by the fact that Hillman was making it. In the decades since he commanded a squadron at Midway, he must have bumped down quite a few moral steps.

I said: “You better forget about that approach, Mr. Hillman. It’s part of the collision course with the law I was talking about. And you’ll end up sunk.”

“I’m sunk now,” he said in an even voice.

He laid his head down on his arms. His hair spilled forward like a broken white sheaf. I could see the naked pink circle on the crown which was ordinarily hidden. It was like a tonsure of mortality.

“What did you do with the knife?” I said to him. “Did you give it to Dick Leandro?”

“No.”

Spreading his hands on the tablecloth, he pushed himself upright. His moist palms slipped and squeaked on the polished surface. “I wish I had.”

“Was Tom the one you gave it to?”

He groaned. “I not only gave it to him. I told Botkin I was buying the bloody thing as a gift for him. Bastian must be aware of that, but he’s holding it back.”

“Bastian would,” I said. “It still doesn’t follow that Tom used it on his father and mother. He certainly had no reason to kill his mother.”

“He doesn’t need a rational motive. You don’t know Tom.”

“You keep telling me that. At the same time you keep refusing to fill in the picture.”

“It’s a fairly ugly picture.”

“Something was said tonight about a homicidal attack.”

“I didn’t mean to let that slip out.”

“Who attacked whom and why?”

“Tom threatened Elaine with a loaded gun. He wasn’t kidding, either.”

“Was this the Sunday-morning episode you’ve been suppressing?”

He nodded. “I think the accident must have affected his mind. When I got home from the judge’s house, he had her in his room. He was holding my revolver with the muzzle against her head” Hillman pressed his fingertip into his temple – and he had her down on her knees, begging for mercy. Literally begging. I didn’t know whether he was going to give me the gun, either. For a minute he held it on me. I half expected him to shoot me.”

I could feel the hairs prickling at the nape of my neck. It was an ugly picture, all right. What was worse, it was a classic one: the schizophrenic execution killer.

“Did he say anything when you took the gun?”

“Not a word. He handed it over in a rather formal way. He acted like a kind of automaton. He didn’t seem to realize what he’d done, or tried to do.”

“Had he said anything to your wife?”

“Yes. He said he would kill her if she didn’t leave him alone. She’d simply gone to his room to offer him some food, and he went into this silent white rage of his.”

“He had a lot of things on his mind,” I said, “and he’d been up all night. He told me something about it. You might say it was the crucial night of his young life. He met his real father for the first time” – Hillman grimaced – “which must have been a fairly shattering experience. You might say he was lost between two worlds, and blaming you and your wife for not preparing him. You should have, you know. You had no right to cheat him of the facts, whether you liked them or not. When the facts finally hit him, it was more than he could handle. He deliberately turned the car over that morning.”

“You mean he attempted suicide?” Hillman said.

“He made a stab at it. I think it was more a signal that his life was out of control. He didn’t let go of the steering wheel, and he wasn’t badly hurt. Nobody got hurt in the gun incident, either.”

“You’ve got to take it seriously, though. He was in dead earnest.”

“Maybe. I’m not trying to brush it off. Have you talked it over with a psychiatrist?”

“I have not. There are certain things you don’t let out of the family.”

“That depends on the family.”

“Look,” he said, “I was afraid they wouldn’t admit him to the school if they knew he was that violent.”

“Would that have been such a tragedy?”

“I had to do something with him. I don’t know what I’m going to do with him now.”

He bowed his disheveled head.

“You need better advice than I can give you, legal and psychiatric.”

“You’re assuming he killed those two people.”

“Not necessarily. Why don’t you ask Dr. Weintraub to recommend somebody?”

Hillman jerked himself upright. “That old woman?”

“I understood he was an old friend of yours, and he knows something about psychiatry.”

“Weinie has a worm’s-eye knowledge, I suppose.” His voice rasped with contempt. “He had a nervous breakdown after Midway. We had to send him stateside to recuperate, while men were dying. While men were dying,” Hillman repeated. Then he seemed to surround himself with silence.

He sat in a listening attitude. I waited. His angry face became smooth and his voice changed with it. “Jesus, that was a day. We lost more than half of our TBD’s. The Zekes took them like sitting ducks. I couldn’t bring them back. I don’t blame Weinie for breaking down, so many men died on him.”

His voice was hushed. His eyes were distant. He didn’t even seem aware of my presence. His mind was over the edge of the world where his men had died, and he had died more than a little.

“The hell of it is,” he was saying, “I love Tom. We haven’t been close for years, and he’s been hard to handle. But he’s my son, and I love him.”

“I’m sure you do. But maybe you want more than Tom can give you. He can’t give you back your dead pilots.”

Hillman didn’t understand me. He seemed bewildered. His gray eyes were clouded.

“What did you say?”

“Perhaps you were expecting too much from the boy.”

“In what way?”

“Forget it,” I said.

Hillman was hurt. “You think I expect too much? I’ve been getting damn little. And look what I’m willing to give him.”

He spread his arms again, to embrace the house and everything he owned. “Why, he can have every nickel I possess for his defense. We’ll get him off and go to another country to live.”

“You’re away ahead of yourself, Mr. Hillman. He hasn’t been charged with anything yet.”

“He will be.”

His voice sounded both fatalistic and defiant.

“Maybe. Let’s consider the possibilities. The only evidence against him is the knife, and that’s pretty dubious if you think about it. He didn’t take it with him, surely, when you put him in Laguna Perdida.”

“He may have. I didn’t search him.”

“I’m willing to bet they did.”

Hillman narrowed his eyes until they were just a glitter between the folded lids. “You’re right, Archer. He didn’t have the knife when he left the house. I remember seeing it afterwards, that same day.”