Росс Макдональд - The Far Side of the Dollar

“Until this week.”

He was jolted into temporary silence. “Anyway, Susanna lost interest–”

“I don’t want to talk about Susanna.”

“That suits me.”

We had moved back into the corridor that led to the library, out of hearing of the room where Elaine was. Hillman leaned on the wall like a bystander in an alley. His posture made me realize how transient and insecure he felt in his own house.

“There are one or two things I don’t understand,” I said. “You tell me you spent one night with Carol, and yet you’re certain that you fathered her son.”

“He was born just nine months later, December the twelfth.”

“That doesn’t prove you’re his father. Pregnancies often last longer, especially first ones. Mike Harley could have fathered him before the Shore Patrol took him. Or any other man.”

“There was no other man. She was a virgin.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I am not. Her marriage to Mike Harley was never consummated. Mike was impotent, which was one reason he was willing to have the boy pass as his.”

“Why was that so necessary, Hillman? Why didn’t you take the boy and raise him yourself?”

“I did that.”

“I mean, raise him openly as your own son.”

“I couldn’t. I had other commitments. I was already married to Elaine. She’s a New Englander, a Puritan of the first water.”

“With a fortune of the first water.”

“I admit I needed her help to start my business. A man has to make choices.”

He looked up at the chandelier. Its light fell starkly on his hollow bronze face. He turned his face away from the light.

“Who told you Mike Harley was impotent?”

“Carol did, and she wasn’t lying. She was a virgin, I tell you. She did a lot of talking in the course of the night. Her whole life. She told me Mike got what sex he got by being spanked, or beaten with a strap.”

“By her?”

“Yes. She didn’t enjoy it, of course, but she did it for him willingly enough. She seemed to feel that it was less dangerous than sex, than normal sex.”

A wave of sickness went through me. It wasn’t physical. But I could smell the old man’s cow barn and hear the whining of his one-eyed dog.

“I thought you were the one who was supposed to be impotent,” I said, “or sterile.”

He glanced at me sharply. “Who have you been talking to?”

“Your wife. She did the talking.”

“And she still thinks I’m sterile?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

He turned his face away from the light again and let out a little chuckle of relief. “Maybe we can pull this out yet. I told Elaine at the time we adopted Tom that Weintraub gave me a test and found that I was sterile. I was afraid she’d catch on to the fact of my paternity.”

“You may be sterile at that.”

He didn’t know what I meant. “No. It’s Elaine who is. I didn’t need to take any test. I have Tom to prove I’m a man.”

He didn’t have Tom.

WE WENT INTO the sitting room, the waiting room. Though Tom was in the house the waiting seemed to go on, as if it had somehow coalesced with time. Elaine was in her place on the chesterfield. She had taken up her knitting, and her stainless-steel needles glinted along the edge of the red wool. She looked up brightly at her husband.

“Where’s Tom?” he said. “Is he still upstairs?”

“I heard him go down the back stairs. I imagine Mrs. Perez is feeding him in the kitchen. He seems to prefer the kitchen to the sitting room. I suppose that’s natural, considering his heredity.”

“We won’t go into the subject of that, eh?”

Hillman went into the bar alcove and made himself a very dark-looking highball. He remembered to offer me one, which I declined.

“What did that policeman want?” Elaine asked him.

“He had some stupid questions on his mind. I prefer not to go into them.”

“So you’ve been telling me for the past twenty-five years. You prefer not to go into things. Save the surface. Never mind the dry rot at the heart.”

“Could we dispense with the melodrama?”

“The word is tragedy, not melodrama. A tragedy has gone through this house and you don’t have the mind to grasp it. You live in a world of appearances, like a fool.”

“I know. I know.”

His voice was light, but he looked ready to throw his drink in her face. “I’m an ignorant engineer, and I never studied philosophy.”

Her needles went on clicking. “I could stand your ignorance, but I can’t stand your evasions any longer.”

He drank part of his drink, and waved his free hand loosely over his head. “Good heavens, Elaine, how much do I have to take from you? This isn’t the time or place for one of those.”

“There never is a time or place,” she said. “If there’s time, you change the clocks – this is known as crossing the International Ralph Line – and suddenly it’s six o’clock in the morning, in Tokyo. If there’s a place, you find an escape hatch. I see your wriggling legs and then you’re off and away, into the wild Ralph yonder. You never faced up to anything in your life.”

He winced under her bitter broken eloquence. “That isn’t true,” he said uneasily. “Archer and I have been really dredging tonight.”

“Dredging in the warm shallows of your nature? I thought you reserved that pastime for your women. Like Susanna Drew.”

Her name sent a pang through me. It was a nice name, innocent and bold and slightly absurd, and it didn’t deserve to be bandied about by these people. If the Hillmans had ever been innocent, their innocence had been frittered away in a marriage of pretenses. It struck me suddenly that Hillman’s affair with Susanna had also been one of pretenses. He had persuaded her to take care of Carol without any hint that he was the father of the child she was carrying.

“Good Lord,” he was saying now, “are we back on the Drew girl again after all these years?”

“Well, are we?” Elaine said.

Fortunately the telephone rang. Hillman went into the alcove to answer it, and turned to me with his hand clapped over the mouthpiece.

“It’s Bastian, for you. You can take the call in the pantry. I’m going to listen on this line.”

There wasn’t much use arguing. I crossed the music room and the dining room to the butler’s pantry and fumbled around in the dark for the telephone. I could hear Mrs. Perez in the kitchen, talking to Tom in musical sentences about her native province of Sinaloa. Bastian’s voice in the receiver sounded harsh and inhuman by comparison: “Archer?”

“I’m here.”

“Good. I checked the matter of Dick Leandro’s transportation, in fact I’ve just been talking to a girl friend of his. She’s a senior at the college, named Katie Ogilvie, and she owns a Chevrolet sedan, this year’s model, blue in color. She finally admitted she lent it to him last night. He put over a hundred miles on the odometer.”

“Are you sure she wasn’t with him? He had a girl with him, or another boy, Daly wasn’t quite sure.”

“It wasn’t Miss Ogilvie,” Bastian said. “She was peeved about the fact that he used her car to take another girl for a long ride.”

“How does she know it was a girl?”

“The lady dropped a lipstick in the front seat. A very nice white gold lipstick, fourteen carat. I don’t think,” he added dryly, “that Miss Ogilvie would have testified so readily if it wasn’t for that lipstick. Apparently Leandro impressed the need for secrecy on her.”

“Did he say why?”

“It had something to do with the Hillman kidnapping. That was all she knew. Well, do we pick up Leandro? You seem to be calling the shots.”