Росс Макдональд - The Far Side of the Dollar

“He’s on his way out here. Maybe you better follow along.”

“You sound as if things are building up to a climax.”

“Yeah.”

I could see its outlines. They burned on my eyeballs like the lights of Dack’s Auto Court. I sat in the dark after Bastian hung up, and tried to blink them away. But they spread out into the darkness around me and became integrated with the actual world.

Sinaloa, Mrs. Perez was saying or kind of singing to Tom in the kitchen, Sinaloa was a land of many rivers. There were eleven rivers in all, and she and her family lived so close to one of them that her brothers would put on their bathing suits and run down for a swim every day. Her father used to go down to the river on Sunday and catch fish with a net and distribute them to the neighbors. All the neighbors had fish for Sunday lunch.

Tom said it sounded like fun.

Ah yes, it was like Paradise, she said, and her father was a highly regarded man in their barrio . Of course it was hot in summer, that was the chief drawback, a hundred and twenty degrees in the shade sometimes. Then big black clouds would pile up along the Sierra Madre Occidental, and it would rain so hard, inches in just two hours. Then it would be sunny again. Sunny, sunny, sunny! That was how life went in Sinaloa.

Tom wanted to know if her father was still alive. She replied with joy that her father lived on, past eighty now, in good health. Perez was visiting him on his present trip to Mexico.

“I’d like to visit your father.”

“Maybe you will some day.”

I opened the door. Tom was at the kitchen table, eating the last of his soup. Mrs. Perez was leaning over him with a smiling maternal mouth and faraway eyes. She looked distrustfully at me. I was an alien in their land of Sinaloa.

“What do you want?”

“A word with Tom. I’ll have to ask you to leave for a bit.”

She stiffened.

“On second thought, there won’t be any more secrets in this house. You might as well stay, Mrs. Perez.”

“Thank you.”

She picked up the soup bowl and walked switching to the sink, where she turned the hot water full on. Tom regarded me across the table with the infinite boredom of the young. He was very clean and pale.

“I hate to drag you back over the details,” I said, “but you’re the only one who can answer some of these questions.”

“It’s okay.”

“I’m not clear about yesterday, especially last night. Were you still at the Barcelona Hotel when Mike Harley got back from Vegas?”

“Yes. He was in a very mean mood. He told me to beat it before he killed me. I was intending to leave, anyway.”

“And nobody stopped you?”

“He wanted to get rid of me.”

“What about Sipe?”

“He was so drunk he hardly knew what he was doing. He passed out before I left.”

“What time did you leave?”

“A little after eight. It wasn’t dark yet. I caught a bus at the corner.”

“You weren’t there when Dick Leandro arrived?”

“No sir.”

His eyes widened. “Was he at the hotel?”

“Evidently he was. Did Sipe or Harley ever mention him?”

“No sir.”

“Do you know what he might have been doing there?”

“No sir. I don’t know much about him. He’s their friend.”

He shrugged one shoulder and arm toward the front of the house.

“Whose friend in particular? His or hers?”

“His. But she uses him, too.”

“To drive her places?”

“For anything she wants.”

He spoke with the hurt ineffectual anger of a displaced son. “When he does something she wants, she says she’ll leave him money in her will. If he doesn’t, like when he has a date, she says she’ll cut him out. So usually he breaks the date.”

“Would he kill someone for her?”

Mrs. Perez had turned off the hot water. In the steamy silence at her end of the kitchen, she made an explosive noise that sounded like “Chuh!”

“I don’t know what he’d do,” Tom said deliberately. “He’s a yacht bum and they’re all the same, but they’re all different, too. It would depend on how much risk there was in it. And how much money.”

“Harley,” I said, “was stabbed with the knife your father gave you, the hunting knife with the striped handle.”

“I didn’t stab him.”

“Where did you last see the knife?”

He considered the question. “It was in my room, in the top drawer with the handkerchiefs and stuff.”

“Did Dick Leandro know where it was?”

“ I never showed him. He never came to my room.”

“Did your mother – did Elaine Hillman know where it was?”

“I guess so. She’s always– she was always coming into my room, and checking on my things.”

“That’s true,” Mrs. Perez said.

I acknowledged her comment with a look which discouraged further comment.

“I understand on a certain Sunday morning she came into your room once too often. You threatened to shoot her with your father’s gun.”

Mrs. Perez made her explosive noise. Tom bit hard on the tip of his right thumb. His look was slanting, over my head and to one side, as if there was someone behind me.

“Is that the story they’re telling?” he said.

Mrs. Perez burst out: “It isn’t true. I heard her yelling up there. She came downstairs and got the gun out of the library desk and went upstairs with it.”

“Why didn’t you stop her?”

“I was afraid,” she said. “Anyway, Mr. Hillman was coming – I heard his car – and I went outside and told him there was trouble upstairs. What else could I do, with Perez away in Mexico?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Tom said. “Nothing happened. I took the gun away from her.”

“Did she try to shoot you?”

“She said she would if I didn’t take back what I said.”

“And what did you say?”

“That I’d rather live in an auto court with my real mother than in this house with her. She blew her top and ran downstairs and got the gun.”

“Why didn’t you tell your father about this?”

“He isn’t my father.”

I didn’t argue. It took more than genes to establish fatherhood. “Why didn’t you tell him, Tom?”

He made an impatient gesture with his hand. “What was the use? He wouldn’t have believed me. Anyway, I was mad at her, for lying to me about who I was. I did take the gun and point it at her head.”

“And want to kill her?”

He nodded. His head seemed very heavy on his neck. Mrs. Perez invented a sudden errand and bustled past him, pressing his shoulder with her hand as she went. As if to signalize this gesture, an electric bell rang over the pantry door.

“That’s the front door,” she said to nobody in particular.

I got there in a dead heat with Ralph Hillman. He let Dick Leandro in. The week’s accelerated aging process was working in Leandro now. Only his dark hair seemed lively. His face was drawn and slightly yellowish. He gave me a lackluster glance, and appealed to Hillman: “Could I talk to you alone, Skipper? It’s important.”

He was almost chattering.

Elaine spoke from the doorway of the sitting room: “It can’t be so important that you’d forget your manners. Come in and be sociable, Dick. I’ve been alone all evening, or so it seems.”

“We’ll join you later,” Hillman said.

“It’s very late already.”

Her voice was edgy.

Leandro’s dim brown glance moved back and forth between them like a spectator’s at a tennis game on which he had bet everything he owned.

“If you’re not nice to me,” she said lightly, “I won’t be nice to you, Dick.”

“I do-don’t care about that.”

There was strained defiance in his voice.