The Far Side of the Dollar (3 page)

“I can give you my own impression.”

She had a little difficulty with the word, and it seemed to affect her balance. She walked into Patch’s office and leaned on
his desk facing me. Her face, half-shadowed in the upward light from the lamp, reminded me of a sibyl’s.

“Tom Hillman is a pretty nice boy. He didn’t belong here. He found that out in a hurry. And so he left.”

“Why didn’t he belong here?”

“You want me to go into detail? East Hall is essentially a place for boys with personality and character problems, or with a sociopathic tendency. We keep the more disturbed youngsters, boys and girls, in West Hall.”

“And Tom belonged there?”

“Hardly. He shouldn’t have been sent to Laguna Perdida at all. This is just my opinion, but it ought to be worth something. I used to be a pretty good clinical psychologist.” She looked down into the light.

“Dr. Sponti seems to think Tom was disturbed.”

“Dr. Sponti never thinks otherwise, about any prospect. Do you know what these kids’ parents pay? A thousand dollars a month, plus extras. Music lessons. Group therapy.” She laughed harshly. “When half the time it’s the parents who should be here. Or in some worse place.

“A thousand dollars a month,” she repeated. “So Dr. Sponti so-called can draw his twenty-five thousand a year. Which is more than six times what he pays me for holding the kids’ hands.”

She was a woman with a grievance. Sometimes grievances made for truth-telling, but not always. “What do you mean, Dr. Sponti so-called?”

“He’s not a medical doctor, or any other kind of real doctor. He took his degree in educational administration, at one of the diploma mills down south. Do you know what he wrote his dissertation on? The kitchen logistics of the medium-sized boarding school.”

“Getting back to Tom,” I said, “why would his father bring him here if he didn’t need psychiatric treatment?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know his father. Probably because he wanted him out of his sight.”

“Why?” I insisted.

“The boy was in some kind of trouble.”

“Did Tom tell you that?”

“He wouldn’t talk about it. But I can read the signs.”

“Have you heard the story that he stole a car?”

“No, but it would help to explain him. He’s a very unhappy young man, and a guilty one. He isn’t one of your hardened j.d.’s. Not that any of them
really
are.”

“You seem to have liked Tom Hillman.”

“What little I saw of him. He didn’t want to talk last week, and I try never to force myself on the boys. Except for class hours, he spent most of the time in his room. I think he was trying to work something out.”

“Like a plan for revolution?”

Her eyes glinted with amusement. “You heard about that did you? The boy had more gumption than I gave him credit for. Don’t look so surprised. I’m on the boys’ side. Why else would I be here?”

I was beginning to like Mrs. Mallow. Sensing this, she moved toward me and touched my arm. “I hope that you are, too. On Tom’s side, I mean.”

“I’ll wait until I know him. It isn’t important, anyway.”

“Yes it is. It’s always important.”

“Just what happened between Tom and Mr. Patch Saturday night?”

“I wouldn’t know, really. Saturday night is my night off. You can make a note of that if you like, Mr. Archer.”

She smiled, and I caught a glimpse of her life’s meaning. She cared for other people. Nobody cared for her.

S
HE LET ME OUT
through a side door which had to be unlocked. The rain was just heavy enough to wet my face. Dense-looking clouds were gathering over the mountains, which probably meant that the rain was going to persist.

I started back toward the administration building. Sponti was
going to have to be told that I must see Tom Hillman’s parents, whether he approved or not. The varying accounts of Tom I’d had, from people who liked or disliked him, gave me no distinct impression of his habits or personality. He could be a persecuted teen-ager, or a psychopath who knew how to appeal to older women, or something in between, like Fred the Third.

I wasn’t looking where I was going, and a yellow cab almost ran me down in the parking lot. A man in tweeds got out of the back seat. I thought he was going to apologize to me, but he didn’t appear to see me.

He was a tall, silver-haired man, well fed, well cared for, probably good-looking under normal conditions. At the moment he looked haggard. He ran into the administration building. I walked in after him, and found him arguing with Sponti’s secretary.

“I’m very sorry, Mr. Hillman,” she intoned. “Dr. Sponti is in conference. I can’t possibly interrupt him.”

“I think you’d better,” Hillman said in a rough voice.

“I’m sorry. You’ll have to wait.”

“But I can’t wait. My son is in the hands of criminals. They’re trying to extort money from me.”

“Is that true?” Her voice was unprofessional and sharp.

“I’m not in the habit of lying.”

The girl excused herself and went into Sponti’s office, closing the door carefully behind her. I spoke to Hillman, telling him my name and occupation:

“Dr. Sponti called me in to look for your son. I’ve been wanting to talk to you. It seems to be time I did.”

“Yes. By all means.”

He took my hand. He was a large, impressive-looking man. His face had the kind of patrician bony structure that doesn’t necessarily imply brains or ability, or even decency, but that generally goes with money. He was deep in the chest and heavy in the shoulders. But there was no force in his grasp. He was trembling all over, like a frightened dog.

“You said something about criminals and extortion.”

“Yes.” But his steel-gray eyes kept shifting away to the door of Sponti’s office. He wanted to talk to somebody he could blame. “What are they doing in there?” he said a little wildly.

“It hardly matters. If your son’s been kidnapped, Sponti can’t help you much. It’s a matter for the police.”

“No! The police stay out. I’ve been instructed to keep them out.” His eyes focused on me for the first time, hard with suspicion. “You’re not a policeman, are you?”

“I told you I was a private detective. I just came down from Los Angeles an hour ago. How did you find out about Tom, and who gave you your instructions?”

“One of the gang. He telephoned my house when we were just sitting down to lunch. He warned me to keep the matter quiet. Otherwise Tom will never come back.”

“Did he say that?”

“Yes.”

“What else did he say?”

“They want to sell me information about Tom’s whereabouts. It was just a euphemism for ransom money.”

“How much?”

“Twenty-five thousand dollars.”

“Do you have it?”

“I’ll have it by the middle of the afternoon. I’m selling some stock. I went into town to my broker’s before I came here.”

“You move fast, Mr. Hillman.” He needed some mark of respect. “But I don’t quite understand why you came out here.”

“I don’t trust these people,” he said in a lowered voice. Apparently he had forgotten, or hadn’t heard, that I was working for Sponti. “I believe that Tom was lured away from here, perhaps with inside help, and they’re covering up.”

“I doubt that very much. I’ve talked to the staff member involved. He and Tom had a fight Saturday night, and later Tom cut a screen and went over the fence. One of the students confirmed this, more or less.”

“A student would be afraid to deny the official story.”

“Not this student, Mr. Hillman. If your son’s been kidnapped, it happened after he left here. Tell me this, did he have any criminal connections?”

“Tom? You must be out of your mind.”

“I heard he stole a car.”

“Did Sponti tell you that? He had no right to.”

“I got it from other sources. Boys don’t usually steal cars
unless they’ve had some experience outside the law, perhaps with a juvenile gang—”

“He didn’t steal it.” Hillman’s eyes were evasive. “He borrowed it from a neighbor. The fact that he wrecked it was pure accident. He was emotionally upset—”

Hillman was, too. He ran out of breath and words. He opened and closed his mouth like a big handsome fish hooked by circumstance and yanked into alien air. I said:

“What are you supposed to do with the twenty-five thousand? Hold it for further instructions?”

Hillman nodded, and sat down despondently in a chair. Dr. Sponti’s door had opened, and he had been listening, I didn’t know for how long. He came out into the anteroom now, flanked by his secretary and followed by a man with a long cadaverous face.

“What’s this about kidnapping?” Sponti said in a high voice. He forced his voice down into a more soothing register: “I’m sorry, Mr. Hillman.”

Hillman’s sitting position changed to a kind of crouch. “You’re going to be sorrier. I want to know who took my son out of here, and under what circumstances, and with whose connivance.”

“Your son left here of his own free will, Mr. Hillman.”

“And you wash your hands of him, do you?”

“We never do that with any of our charges, however short their stay. I’ve hired Mr. Archer here to help you out. And I’ve just been talking to Mr. Squerry here, our comptroller.”

The cadaverous man bowed solemnly. Black stripes of hair were pasted flat across the crown of his almost naked head. He said in a precise voice:

“Dr. Sponti and I have decided to refund in full the money you paid us last week. We’ve just written out a check, and here it is.”

He handed over a slip of yellow paper. Hillman crumpled it into a ball and threw it back at Mr. Squerry. It bounced off his thin chest and fell to the floor. I picked it up. It was for two thousand dollars.

Hillman ran out of the room. I walked out after him, before Sponti could terminate my services, and caught Hillman as he was getting into the cab.

“Where are you going?”

“Home. My wife’s in poor shape.”

“Let me drive you.”

“Not if you’re Sponti’s man.”

“I’m nobody’s man but my own. Sponti hired me to find your son. I’m going to do that if it’s humanly possible. But I’ll need some cooperation from you and Mrs. Hillman.”

“What can we do?” He spread his large helpless hands.

“Tell me what kind of a boy he is, who his friends are, where he hangs out—”

“What’s the point of all that? He’s in the hands of gangsters. They want money. I’m willing to pay them.”

The cab driver, who had got out of his seat to open the door for Hillman, stood listening with widening mouth and eyes.

“It may not be as simple as that,” I said. “But we won’t talk about it here.”

“You can trust me,” the driver said huskily. “I got a brother-in-law on the Highway Patrol. Besides, I never blab about my fares.”

“You better not,” Hillman said.

He paid the man, and came along with me to my car.

“Speaking of money,” I said when we were together in the front seat, “you didn’t really want to throw away two thousand dollars, did you?” I smoothed out the yellow check and handed it to him.

There’s no way to tell what will make a man break down. A long silence, or a telephone ringing, or the wrong note in a woman’s voice. In Hillman’s case, it was a check for two thousand dollars. He put it away in his alligator wallet, and then he groaned loudly. He covered his eyes with his hands and leaned his forehead on the dash. Cawing sounds came out of his mouth as if an angry crow was tearing at his vitals.

After a while he said: “I should never have put him in this place.” His voice was more human than it had been, as if he had broken through into a deeper level of self-knowledge.

“Don’t cry over spilt milk.”

He straightened up. “I wasn’t crying.” It was true his eyes were dry.

“We won’t argue, Mr. Hillman. Where do you live?”

“In El Rancho. It’s between here and the city. I’ll tell you how to get there by the shortest route.”

The guard limped out of his kiosk, and we exchanged half-salutes. He activated the gates. Following Hillman’s instructions, I drove out along a road which passed through a reedy wasteland where blackbirds were chittering, then through a suburban wasteland jammed with new apartments, and around the perimeter of a college campus. We passed an airport, where a plane was taking off. Hillman looked as if he wished he were on it.

“Why did you put your son in Laguna Perdida School?”

His answer came slowly, in bits and snatches. “I was afraid. He seemed to be headed for trouble. I felt I had to prevent it somehow. I was hoping they could straighten him out so that he could go back to regular school next month. He’s supposed to be starting his senior year in high school.”

“Would you mind being specific about the trouble he was in? Do you mean car theft?”

“That was one of the things. But it wasn’t a true case of theft, as I explained.”

“You didn’t explain, though.”

“It was Rhea Carlson’s automobile he took. Rhea and Jay Carlson are our next-door neighbors. When you leave a new Dart in an open carport all night with the key in the ignition, it’s practically an invitation to a joyride. I told them that. Jay would’ve admitted it, too, if he hadn’t had a bit of a down on Tom. Or if Tom hadn’t wrecked the car. It was fully covered, by my insurance as well as theirs, but they had to take the emotional approach.”

“The car was wrecked?”

“It’s a total loss. I don’t know how he managed to turn it over, but he did. Fortunately he came out of it without a scratch.”

“Where was he going?”

“He was on his way home. The accident happened practically at our door. I’ll show you the place.”

“Then where had he been?”

“He wouldn’t say. He’d been gone all night, but he wouldn’t tell me anything about it.”

“What night was that?”

“Saturday night. A week ago Saturday night. The police brought him home about six o’clock in the morning, and told me I better have our doctor go over him, which I did. He wasn’t hurt physically, but his mind seemed to be affected. He went into a rage when I tried to ask him where he had spent the night I’d never seen him like that before. He’d always been a quiet-spoken boy. He said I had no right to know about him, that I wasn’t really his father, and so on and so forth. I’m afraid I lost my temper and slapped him when he said that Then he turned his back on me and wouldn’t talk at all, about anything.”