The Far Side of the Dollar (24 page)

He sat there looking at me rather sulkily from under his hair, as if I’d halted him in the middle of a Grand Prix. I got out and walked over to the side of his car and patted the hood.

“Nice car.”

“I like it.”

“You have any other cars?”

“Just this one,” he said. “Listen, I hear they f-found Tom, is that the true word?”

“He hasn’t been found yet, but he is running free.”

“Hey, that’s great,” he said without enthusiasm. “Listen, do you know where Skipper is? Mrs. Hillman says he hasn’t been home all night.” He looked up at me with puzzled anxiety.

“I wouldn’t worry about him. He can look after himself.”

“Yeah, sure, but do you know where he
is?
I want to ta-talk to him.”

“What about?”

“That’s between him and I. It’s a personal matter.”

I said unpleasantly: “Do you and Mr. Hillman share a lot of secrets?”

“I w-wouldn’t say that. He
advises
me. He gives me g-good advice.”

The young man was almost babbling with fear and hostility. I
let him go and drove up to the house. Elaine Hillman was the one I wanted to see, and she let me in herself.

She looked better than she had the last time I’d seen her. She was well groomed and well dressed, in a tailored sharkskin suit which concealed the shrinkage of her body. She was even able to smile at me.

“I got your good news, Mr. Archer.”

“Good news?” I couldn’t think of any.

“That Tom is definitely alive. Lieutenant Bastian passed the word to me. Come in and tell me more.”

She led me across the reception hall, making a detour to avoid the area under the chandelier, and into the sitting room. She said almost brightly, as if she was determined to be cheerful:

“I call this the waiting room. It’s like a dentist’s waiting room. But the waiting is almost over, don’t you think?” Her voice curled up thinly at the end, betraying her tension.

“Yes. I really think so.”

“Good. I couldn’t stand much more of this. None of us could. These days have been very difficult.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. You’ve brought us good news.” She perched on the chesterfield. “Now sit down and tell me the rest of it.”

I sat beside her. “There isn’t much more, and not all of it is good. But Tom is alive, and free, and very likely still in Los Angeles. I traced him from the Barcelona Hotel, where he was hiding, to downtown Los Angeles. He was seen getting off a bus in the main station around ten o’clock last night. I’m going back there this afternoon to see if I can find him.”

“I wish my husband was here to share this,” she said. “I’m a little worried about him. He left the house early last evening and hasn’t been back since.” She looked around the room as if it felt strange without him.

I said: “He probably got word that Tom was alive.”

“From whom?”

I left the question unanswered.

“But he wouldn’t go without telling me.”

“Not unless he had a reason.”

“What possible reason could he have for keeping me in the dark?”

“I don’t know, Mrs. Hillman.”

“Is he going out of his mind, do you think?”

“I doubt it. He probably spent the night in Los Angeles searching for Tom. I know he had breakfast this morning with Susanna Drew.”

I’d dropped the name deliberately, without preparation, and got the reaction I was looking for. Elaine’s delicate blonde face crumpled like tissue paper. “Good Lord,” she said, “is that still going on? Even in the midst of these horrors?”

“I don’t know exactly what
is
going on.”

“They’re lovers,” she said bitterly, “for twenty years. He swore to me it was over long ago. He begged me to stay with him, and gave me his word of honor that he would never go near her again. But he has no honor.” She raised her eyes to mine. “My husband is a man without honor.”

“He didn’t strike me that way.”

“Perhaps men can trust him. I know a woman can’t. I’m rather an expert on the subject. I’ve been married to him for over twenty-five years. It wasn’t loyalty that kept him with me. I know that. It was my family’s money, which has been useful to him in his business, and in his hobbies. Including,” she added in a disgusted tone, “his dirty little bed-hopping hobby.”

She covered her mouth with her hand, as if to hide the anguish twisting it. “I shouldn’t be talking this way. It isn’t like me. It’s very much against my New England grain. My mother, who had a similar problem with my father, taught me by precept and example always to suffer in silence. And I have. Except for Ralph himself, you’re the only person I’ve spoken to about it.”

“You haven’t told me much. It might be a good idea to ventilate it.”

“Do you believe it may be connected in some way with—all this?” She flung out her arm, with the fingers spread at the end of it.

“Very likely it is. I think that’s why your husband and Miss Drew got together this morning. He probably phoned her early in the week. Tuesday afternoon.”

“He did! I remember now. He was phoning from the bar, and
I came into the room. He cut it short. But I heard him say something to the effect that they must absolutely keep quiet. It must have been that Drew woman he was talking to.”

The scornful phrase made me wince. It was a painful, strange colloquy, but we were both engrossed in it. The intimacy of the people we were talking about forced intimacy on us.

“It probably was her,” I said. “I’d just told Lieutenant Bastian that she was a witness, and Bastian must have passed it on to your husband.”

“You’re right again, Mr. Archer. My husband had just heard from the lieutenant. How can you possibly know so much about the details of other people’s lives?”

“Other people’s lives are my business.”

“And your passion?”

“And my passion. And my obsession, too, I guess. I’ve never been able to see much in the world besides the people in it.”

“But how could you possibly find out about that phone call? You weren’t here. My husband wouldn’t tell you.”

“I was in Miss Drew’s apartment when the call came. I didn’t hear what was said, but it shook her up.”

“I hope so.” She glanced at my face, and her eyes softened. She reached out and touched my arm with gentle fingers. “She isn’t a friend of yours?”

“She is, in a way.”

“You’re not in love with her?”

“Not if I can help it.”

“That’s a puzzling answer.”

“It puzzles me, too. If she’s still in love with your husband it would tend to chill one’s interest. But I don’t think she is.”

“Then what are they trying to conceal?”

“Something in the past.” I hoped it was entirely in the past. Susanna, I had learned in the course of the morning, could still hurt me where I lived. “It would help if you’d go into it a little deeper. I know it will also hurt,” I said to myself and her.

“I can stand pain if there’s any purpose in it. It’s the meaningless pain I can’t stand. The pain of Tom, for instance.” She didn’t explain what she meant, but she touched her blue-veined temple with her fingertips.

“I’ll try to make it short, Mrs. Hillman. You said the affair has been going on for twenty years. That would take it back to around the end of the war.”

“Yes. The spring of 1945. I was living alone, or rather with a woman companion, in a house in Brentwood. My husband was in the Navy. He had been a squadron commander, but at the time I’m talking about he was executive officer of an escort carrier. Later they made him captain of the same ship.” She spoke with a kind of forlorn pride, and very carefully, as if the precise facts of the past were all she had to hold on to.

“In January or February of 1945 my husband’s ship was damaged by a kamikaze plane. They had to bring it back to San Diego for repairs. Ralph had some days of leave, of course, and of course he visited me. But I didn’t see as much of him as I wanted to, or expected to. I found out later why. He was spending some of his nights, whole weekends, with Susanna Drew.”

“In the Barcelona Hotel?”

“Did she tell you?”

“In a way.” She had given me Harold Harley’s picture of Carol, and the printing on the back of the picture had sent me to the Barcelona Hotel. “About herself she told me, not about your husband. She’s a loyal girl, anyway.”

“I don’t want to hear her praised. She’s caused me too much suffering.”

“I’m sorry. But she was only twenty, remember.”

“She’s closer to forty now. The fact that she was twenty then only made it worse. I was still in my twenties myself, but my husband had already discarded me. Do you have any idea how a woman feels when her husband leaves her for a younger woman? Can you imagine the crawling of the flesh?”

She was suffering intense remembered pain. Her eyes were bright and dry, as if there was fire behind them. The cheerfullest thing I could think of to say was:

“But he didn’t leave you.”

“No. He came back. It wasn’t me he cared for. There was the money, you see, and his postwar plans for his engineering firm. He was quite frank on the subject, and quite impenitent. In fact, he seemed to feel that he was doing me an enormous favor. He
felt that any couple who couldn’t have a child—” Her hand went to her mouth again.

I prompted her: “But you had Tom.”

“Tom came later,” she said, “too late to save us.” Her voice broke into a deeper range. “Too late to save my husband. He’s a tragically unhappy man. But I can’t find it in my heart to pity him.” Her hand touched her thin breast and lingered there.

“What’s the source of the trouble between him and Tom?”

“The falsity,” she said in her deeper voice.

“The falsity?”

“I might as well tell you, Mr. Archer. You’re going to find out about it sooner or later, anyway. And it may be important. Certainly it’s psychologically important.”

“Was Tom—is Tom an adopted son?”

She nodded slowly. “It may have to come out publicly, I don’t know. For the present I’ll ask you not to divulge it to anyone. No one in town here knows it. Tom doesn’t know it himself. We adopted him in Los Angeles shortly after my husband left the Navy and before we moved here.”

“But he resembles your husband.”

“Ralph chose him for that reason. He’s a very vain man, Mr. Archer. He’s ashamed to admit even to our friends that we were incapable of producing a child of our own. Actually Ralph is the one who is sterile. I’m telling you this so you’ll understand why he has insisted from the beginning on the great pretense. His desire to have a son was so powerful, I think he has actually believed at times that Tom is his own flesh and blood.”

“And he hasn’t told Tom he isn’t?”

“No. Neither have I. Ralph wouldn’t let me.”

“Isn’t that supposed to be a poor idea, with an adopted child?”

“I told my husband that from the beginning. He had to be honest with Tom, or Tom would not be honest with him. There would be falsity at the center of the household.” Her voice trembled, and she looked down at the carpet as if there was no floor under it. “Well, you see what the consequence has been. A ruined boyhood for Tom and a breakdown of the family and now this tragedy.”

“This almost-tragedy. He’s still alive and we’re going to get him back.”

“But can we ever put the family back together?”

“That will depend on all three of you. I’ve seen worse fractures mended, but not without competent help. I don’t mean Laguna Perdida. And I don’t mean just help for Tom.”

“I know. I’ve been wretchedly unhappy, and my husband has been quite—quite irrational on this subject for many years. Actually I think it goes back to Midway. Ralph’s squadron was virtually massacred in that dreadful battle. Of course he blamed himself, since he was leading them. He felt as though he had lost a dozen sons.”

“How do you know?”

“He was still writing to me then,” she said, “freely and fully, as one human being to another. He wrote me a number of very poignant letters about our having children, sons of our own. I
know
the thought was connected with his lost fliers, although he never said so. And when he found out he couldn’t have a son of his own, and decided to adopt Tom, well—” She dropped her hands in her lap. Her hands seemed restless without knitting to occupy them.

“What were you going to say, Mrs. Hillman?”

“I hardly know. I’m not a psychologist, though I once had some training in philosophy. I’ve felt that Ralph was trying to live out some sort of a fantasy with Tom—perhaps relive those terrible war years and make good his losses somehow. But you can’t use people in that way, as figures in a fantasy. The whole thing broke down between Tom and his father.”

“And Tom caught on that your husband wasn’t his father.”

She looked at me nervously. “You think he did?”

“I’m reasonably certain of it,” I said, remembering what Fred Tyndal had told me. “Mrs. Hillman, what happened on the Sunday morning that you put Tom in Laguna Perdida?”

She said quickly: “It was Ralph’s doing, not mine.”

“Had they quarreled?”

“Yes. Ralph was horribly angry with him.”

“What about?”

She bowed her head. “My husband has forbidden me to speak of it.”

“Did Tom say something or do something very wrong?”

She sat with her head bowed and wouldn’t answer me. “I’ve told you more than I should have,” she said eventually, “in the hope of getting to the bottom of this mess. Now will you tell me something? You mentioned a hotel called the Barcelona, and you said that Tom had been hiding there. You used the word ‘hiding.’ ”

“Yes.”

“Wasn’t he being held?”

“I don’t know. There may have been some duress, possibly psychological duress. But I doubt that he was held in the ordinary sense.”

She looked at me with distaste. I’d brought her some very tough pieces of information to chew on, and probably this was the hardest one of all. “You’ve hinted from the beginning that Tom cooperated willingly with the kidnappers.”

“It was a possibility that had to be considered. It still is.”

“Please don’t sidestep the question. I can stand a direct answer.” She smiled dimly. “At this point I couldn’t stand anything else.”