Росс Макдональд - The Far Side of the Dollar

“You will.”

Stiff-backed, she retreated into the sitting room.

I said to Leandro: “We won’t waste any more time. Did you do some driving for Mrs. Hillman last night?”

He turned away from me and almost leaned on Hillman, speaking in a hushed rapid voice. “I’ve got to talk to you alone. Something’s come up that you don’t know about.”

“We’ll go into the library,” Hillman said.

“If you do, I go along,” I said. “But we might as well talk here. I don’t want to get too far from Mrs. Hillman.”

The young man turned and looked at me in a different way, both lost and relieved. He knew I knew.

Hillman also knew, I thought. His proposal to Susanna tended to prove it; his confession that Tom was his natural son had provided me with evidence of motive. He leaned now on the wall beside the door, heavy and mysterious as a statue, with half-closed eyes.

I said to the younger man: “Did you drive her to the Barcelona Hotel, Dick?”

“Yessir.”

With one shoulder high and his head on one side, he held himself in an awkward pose which gave the effect of writhing. “I had no w-way of knowing what was on her mind. I still don’t know.”

“But you have a pretty good idea. Why all the secrecy?”

“She said I should borrow a car, that they had phoned for more money and Skipper wasn’t here so we would have to deliver it. Or else they’d kill him. We were to keep it secret from the police, and afterwards she said I must never tell anyone.”

“And you believed her story?”

“I c-certainly did.”

“When did you start to doubt it?”

“Well, I couldn’t figure out how she could get hold of all that c-cash.”

“How much?”

“Another twenty-five thousand, she said. She said it was in her bag – she was carrying her big knitting bag – but I didn’t actually see the money.”

“What did you see?”

“I didn’t actually see anything.”

Like a stealthy animal that would eventually take over his entire forehead, his hair was creeping down toward his eyes. “I mean, I saw this character, the one she– I saw this character come out of the hotel and they went around the back and I heard this scream.”

He scratched the front of his throat.

“What did you do?”

“I stayed in the car. She told me to stay in the car. When she came back, she said it was an owl.”

“And you believed her?”

“I don’t know much about birds. Do I, Skipper?”

Elaine cried out very brightly from her doorway: “What under heaven are you men talking about?”

I walked toward her. “You. The owl you heard last night in the hotel garden. What kind of an owl was it?”

“A screech–” Her hand flew up and pressed against her lips.

“He looked human to me. He wasn’t a very good specimen, but he was human.”

She stopped breathing, and then gasped for breath. “He was a devil,” she said, “the scum of the earth.”

“Because he wanted more money?”

“It would have gone on and on. I had to stop him.”

She stood shuddering in the doorway. With a fierce effort of will, she brought her emotions under control. “Speaking of money, I can take care of you. I’m sure the police would understand my position, but there’s no need to connect me with this– this–” She couldn’t think of a noun. “I can take care of you and I can take care of Dick.”

“How much are you offering?”

She looked at me imperiously, from the moral stilts of inherited wealth.

“Come into the sitting room,” she said, “and we’ll talk about it.”

The three of us followed her into the room and took up positions around her chesterfield. Hillman looked at me curiously. He was very silent and subdued, but the calculator behind his eyes was still working. Dick Leandro was coming back to life. His eyes had brightened. Perhaps he still imagined that somehow, sometime, there would be Hillman money coming to him.

“How much?” I said to her.

“Twenty-five thousand.”

“That’s better than a knife between the ribs. Does that mean twenty-five thousand overall or twenty-five thousand for each murder?”

“Each murder?”

“There were two, done with the same knife, almost certainly by the same person. You.”

She moved her head away from my pointing finger, like a stage-shy girl. A stage-shy girl playing the role of an aging woman with monkey wrinkles and fading fine blonde hair.

“Fifty thousand then,” she said.

“He’s playing with you,” Hillman said. “You can’t buy him.”

She turned toward him. “My late father once said that you can buy anyone, anyone at all. I proved that when I bought you.”

She made a gesture of repugnance. “I wish I hadn’t. You turned out to be a bad bargain.”

“You didn’t buy me. You merely leased my services.”

They faced each other as implacably as two skulls. She said: “Did you have to palm her bastard off on me?”

“I wanted a son. I didn’t plan it. It happened.”

“You made it happen. You connived to bring her baby into my house. You let me feed and nurture him and call him mine. How could you be such a living falsity?”

“Don’t talk to me about falsity, Elaine. It seemed the best way to handle the problem.”

“Stallion,” she said. “Filth.”

I heard a faint movement in the adjoining room. Straining my eyes into the darkness, I could see Tom sitting on the bench in front of the grand piano. I was tempted to shut the door, but it was too late, really. He might as well hear it all.

Hillman said in a surprisingly calm voice: “I never could understand the Puritan mind, Ellie. You think a little fun in bed is the ultimate sin, worse than murder. Christ, I remember our wedding night. You’d have thought I was murdering you.”

“I wish you had.”

“I almost wish I had. You murdered Carol, didn’t you, Ellie?”

“Of course I did. She phoned here Monday morning, after you left. Tom had given her his telephone number. I took the call in his room, and she spilled out everything. She said she had just caught on to her husband’s plans, and she was afraid he would harm Tom, who wasn’t really his son. I’m sure it was just an excuse she used to get her knife into me.”

“Her knife?” I said.

“That was a badly chosen image, wasn’t it? I mean that she was glorying over me, annulling the whole meaning of my existence.”

“I think she was simply trying to save her son.”

“ Her son, not mine. Her son and Ralph’s. That was the point, don’t you see? I felt as if she had killed me. I was just a fading ghost in the world, with only enough life left to strike back. Walking from where I left the Cadillac, I could feel the rain fall through me. I was no solider than the rain.

“Apparently her husband had caught her phoning me. He took her back to their cottage and beat her and left her unconscious on the floor. She was easy for me to kill. The knife slipped in and out. I hadn’t realized how easy it would be.

“But the second time wasn’t easy,” she said. “The knife caught in his ribs. I couldn’t pull it out of him.”

Her voice was high and childish in complaint. The little girl behind her wrinkles had been caught in a malign world where even things no longer cooperated and even men could not be bought.

“Why did you have to stick it into him?” I said.

“He suspected that I killed Carol. He used Tom’s number to call me and accuse me. Of course he wanted money .”

She spoke as if her possession of money had given her a special contemptuous insight into other people’s hunger for it. “It would have gone on and on.”

It was going on and on. Tom came blinking out of the darkness. He looked around in pity and confusion. Elaine turned her face away from him, as if she had an unprepossessing disease.