The Far Side of the Dollar (4 page)

“Had he been drinking?”

“I don’t think so. No. I would have smelled it on him.”

“What about drugs?”

I could see his face turn toward me, large and vague in my side vision. “That’s out of the question.”

“I hope so. Dr. Sponti told me your son had a peculiar reaction to tranquillizers. That sometimes happens with habitual users.”

“My son was not a drug user.”

“A lot of young people are, nowadays, and their parents are the last to know about it.”

“No. It wasn’t anything like that,” he said urgently. “The shock of the accident affected his mind.”

“Did the doctor think so?”

“Dr. Shanley is an orthopedic surgeon. He wouldn’t know about psychiatric disturbance. Anyway, he didn’t know what happened that morning, when I went to the judge’s house to arrange for bail. I haven’t told anyone about it.”

I waited, and listened to the windshield wipers. A green and white sign on the shoulder of the road announced: “El Rancho.” Hillman said, as if he was glad to have something neutral to say:

“You turn off in another quarter mile.”

I slowed down. “You were going to tell me what happened that Sunday morning.”

“No. I don’t believe I will. It has no bearing on the present situation.”

“How do we know that?”

He didn’t answer me. Perhaps the thought of home and neighbors had silenced him.

“Did you say the Carlsons had a down on Tom?”

“I said that, and it’s true.”

“Do you know the reason for it?”

“They have a daughter, Stella. Tom and Stella Carlson were very close. Jay and Rhea disapproved, at least Rhea did. So did Elaine, my wife, for that matter.”

I turned off the main road. The access road passed between tall stone gateposts and became the palm-lined central road bisecting El Rancho. It was one of those rich developments whose inhabitants couldn’t possibly have troubles. Their big houses sat far back behind enormous lawns. Their private golf course lay across the road we were traveling on. The diving tower of their beach club gleamed with fresh aluminum paint in the wet distance.

But like the drizzle, troubles fall in or out of season on everybody.

The road bent around one corner of the golf course. Hillman pointed ahead to a deep gouge in the bank, where the earth was still raw. Above it a pine tree with a damaged trunk was turning brown in places.

“This is where he turned the car over.”

I stopped the car. “Did he explain how the accident happened?”

Hillman pretended not to hear me. We got out of the car. There was no traffic in sight, except for a foursome of die-hard golfers approaching in two carts along the fairway.

“I don’t see any brake- or skid-marks,” I said. “Was your son an experienced driver?”

“Yes. I taught him to drive myself. I spent a great deal of time with him. In fact, I deliberately reduced my work load at the firm several years ago, partly so that I could enjoy Tom’s growing up.”

His phrasing was a little strange, as if growing up was something a boy did for his parents’ entertainment. It made me wonder. If Hillman had been really close to Tom, why had he
clapped him into Laguna Perdida School at the first sign of delinquency? Or had there been earlier signs which he was suppressing?

One of the golfers waved from his cart as he went by. Hillman gave him a cold flick of the hand and got into my car. He seemed embarrassed to be found at the scene of the accident.

“I’ll be frank with you,” I said as we drove away. “I wish you’d be frank with me. Laguna Perdida is a school for disturbed and delinquent minors. I can’t get it clear why Tom deserved, or needed, to be put there.”

“I did it for his own protection. Good-neighbor Carlson was threatening to prosecute him for car theft.”

“That’s nothing so terrible. He’d have rated probation, if this was a first offense. Was it?”

“Of course it was.”

“Then what were you afraid of?”

“I wasn’t—” he started to say. But he was too honest, or too completely conscious of his fear, to finish the sentence.

“What did he do Sunday morning, when you went to see the judge?”

“He didn’t do anything, really. Nothing happened.”

“But that nothing hit you so hard you won’t discuss it.”

“That’s correct. I won’t discuss it, with you or anyone. Whatever happened last Sunday, or might have happened, has been completely outdated by recent events. My son has been kidnapped. He’s a passive victim, don’t you understand?”

I wondered about that, too. Twenty-five thousand dollars was a lot of money in my book, but it didn’t seem to be in Hillman’s. If Tom was really in the hands of professional criminals, they would be asking for all that the traffic would bear.

“How much money could you raise if you had to, Mr. Hillman?”

He gave me a swift look. “I don’t see the point.”

“Kidnappers usually go the limit in their demands. I’m trying to find out if they have in this case. I gather you could raise a good deal more than twenty-five thousand.”

“I could, with my wife’s help.”

“Let’s hope it won’t be necessary.”

T
HE
H
ILLMANS’
private drive meandered up an oak-covered rise and circled around a lawn in front of their house. It was a big old Spanish mansion, with white stucco walls, wrought-iron ornamentation at the windows, red tile roof gleaming dully in the wet. A bright black Cadillac was parked in the circle ahead of us.

“I meant to drive myself this morning,” Hillman said. “But then I didn’t trust myself to drive. Thanks for the lift.”

It sounded like a dismissal. He started up the front steps, and I felt a keen disappointment. I swallowed it and went after him, slipping inside the front door before he closed it.

It was his wife he was preoccupied with. She was waiting for him in the reception hall, bowed forward in a high-backed Spanish chair which made her look tinier than she was. Her snakeskin shoes hung clear of the polished tile floor. She was a beautifully made thin blonde woman in her forties. An aura of desolation hung about her, a sense of uselessness, as if she was in fact the faded doll she resembled. Her green dress went poorly with her almost greenish pallor.

“Elaine?”

She had been sitting perfectly still, with her knees and fists together. She looked up at her husband, and then over his head at the huge Spanish chandelier suspended on a chain from the beamed ceiling two stories up. Its bulbs protruded like dubious fruit from clusters of wrought-iron leaves.

“Don’t stand under it,” she said. “I’m always afraid it’s going to fall. I wish you’d have it taken down, Ralph.”

“It was your idea to bring it back and put it there.”

“That was a long time ago,” she said. “I thought the space needed filling.”

“It still does, and it’s still perfectly safe.” He moved toward her and touched her head. “You’re wet. You shouldn’t have gone out in your condition.”

“I just walked down the drive to see if you were coming. You were gone a long time.”

“I couldn’t help it.”

She took his hand as it slid away from her head, and held it against her breast. “Did you hear anything?”

“We can’t expect to hear anything yet a while. I made arrangements for the money. Dick Leandro will bring it out later this afternoon. In the meantime we wait for a phone call.”

“It’s hideous, waiting.”

“I know. You should try to think about something else.”

“What else is there?”

“Lots of things.” I think he tried to name one, and gave up. “Anyway, it isn’t good for you to be sitting out here in the cold hall. You’ll give yourself pneumonia again.”

“People don’t give it to
themselves
, Ralph.”

“We won’t argue. Come into the sitting room and I’ll make you a drink.”

He remembered me and included me in the invitation, but he didn’t introduce me to his wife. Perhaps he considered me unworthy, or perhaps he wanted to discourage communication between us. Feeling rather left out, I followed them up three tile steps into a smaller room where a fire was burning. Elaine Hillman stood with her back to it. Her husband went to the bar, which was in an alcove decorated with Spanish bullfight posters.

She held out her hand to me. It was ice cold. “I don’t mean to monopolize the heat. Are you a policeman? I thought we weren’t to use them.”

“I’m a private detective. Lew Archer is my name.”

Her husband called from the alcove: “What will you drink, darling?”

“Absinthe.”

“Is that such a good idea?”

“It has wormwood in it, which suits my mood. But I’ll settle for a short Scotch.”

“What about you, Mr. Archer?”

I asked for the same. I needed it. While I rather liked both of the Hillmans, they were getting on my nerves. Their joint handling of their anxiety was almost professional, as if they were actors improvising a tragedy before an audience of one. I don’t
mean the anxiety wasn’t sincere. They were close to dying of it.

Hillman came back across the room with three lowball glasses on a tray. He set it down on a long table in front of the fireplace and handed each of us a glass. Then he shook up the wood fire with a poker. Flames hissed up the chimney. Their reflection changed his face for a moment to a red savage mask.

His wife’s face hung like a dead moon over her drink. “Our son is very dear to us, Mr. Archer. Can you help us get him back?”

“I can try. I’m not sure it’s wise to keep the police out of this. I’m only one man, and this isn’t my normal stamping ground.”

“Does that make a difference?”

“I have no informers here.”

“Do you hear him, Ralph?” she said to her crouching husband. “Mr. Archer thinks we should have the police in.”

“I hear him. But it isn’t possible.” He straightened up with a sigh, as if the whole weight of the house was on his shoulders. “I’m not going to endanger Tom’s life by anything I do.”

“I feel the same way,” she said. “I’m willing to pay through the nose to get him back. What use is money without a son to spend it on?”

That was another phrase that was faintly strange. I was getting the impression that Tom was the center of the household, but a fairly unknown center, like a god they made sacrifices to and expected benefits from, and maybe punishments, too. I was beginning to sympathize with Tom.

“Tell me about him, Mrs. Hillman.”

Some life came up into her dead face. But before she could open her mouth Hillman said: “No. You’re not going to put Elaine through that now.”

“But Tom’s a pretty shadowy figure to me. I’m trying to get some idea of where he might have gone yesterday, how he got tangled up with extortionists.”

“I don’t know where he went,” the woman said.

“Neither do I. If I had,” Hillman said, “I’d have gone to him yesterday.”

“Then I’m going to have to go out and do some legwork. You can let me have a picture, I suppose.”

Hillman went into an adjoining room, twilit behind pulled drapes, where the open top of a grand piano leaned up out of the shadows. He came back with a silver-framed studio photograph of a boy whose features resembled his own. The boy’s dark eyes were rebellious, unless I was projecting my own sense of the household into them. They were also intelligent and imaginative. His mouth was spoiled.

“Can I take this out of the frame? Or if you have a smaller one, it would be better to show around.”

“To show around?”

“That’s what I said, Mr. Hillman. It’s not for my memory book.”

Elaine Hillman said: “I have a smaller one upstairs on my dressing table. I’ll get it.”

“Why don’t I go up with you? It might help if I went through his room.”

“You can look at his room,” Hillman said, “but I don’t want you searching it.”

“Why?”

“I just don’t like the idea. Tom has the right to some privacy, even now.”

The three of us went upstairs, keeping an eye on each other. I wondered what Hillman was afraid I might find, but I hesitated to ask him. While everything seemed to be under control, Hillman could flare up at any moment and order me out of his house.

He stood at the door while I gave the room a quick once-over. It was a front bedroom, very large, furnished with plain chests of drawers and chairs and a table and a bed which all looked hand-finished and expensive. A bright red telephone sat on the bedside table. There were engravings of sailing ships and Audubon prints hung with geometric precision around the walls, Navajo rugs on the floor, and a wool bedspread matching one of them.

I turned to Hillman. “Was he interested in boats and sailing?”

“Not particularly. He used to come out and crew for me occasionally, on the sloop, when I couldn’t get anyone else. Does it matter?”

“I was just wondering if he hung around the harbor much.”

“No. He didn’t.”

“Was he interested in birds?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Who chose the pictures?”

“I did,” Elaine Hillman said from the hallway. “I decorated the room for Tom. He liked it, didn’t he, Ralph?”

Hillman mumbled something. I crossed the room to the deeply set front windows, which overlooked the semicircular driveway. I could see down the wooded slope, across the golf course, all the way to the highway, where cars rolled back and forth like children’s toys out of reach. I could imagine Tom sitting here in the alcove and watching the highway lights at night.

A thick volume of music lay open on the leather seat. I looked at the cover. It was a well-used copy of
The Well-Tempered Clavier
.

“Did Tom play the piano, Mr. Hillman?”

“Very well. He had ten years of lessons. But then he wanted—”

His wife made a small dismayed sound at his shoulder. “Why go into all that?”

“All what?” I said. “Trying to get information out of you people is like getting blood out of a stone.”

“I
feel
like a bloodless stone,” she said with a little grimace. “This hardly seems the time to rake up old family quarrels.”

“We didn’t quarrel,” her husband said. “It was the one thing Tom and I ever disagreed on. And he went along with me on it. End of subject.”