“Sponti wouldn’t send you to me otherwise.”
“You’re quick on the uptake.”
“I have to pick up what I can,” he said. “You talk a lot without saying much.”
“You say even less. But you’ll talk, Sam.”
He rose in a quick jerky movement and went to the door. I thought he was going to tell me to leave, but he didn’t. He stood against the closed door in the attitude of a man facing a rifle squad.
“What do you expect me to do?” he cried. “Put my neck in the noose so Hillman can hang me?”
I walked toward him.
“Stay away from me!” The fear in his eyes was burning brightly, feeding on a long fuse of experience. He lifted one crooked arm to shield his head. “Don’t touch me!”
“Calm down. That’s hysterical talk, about a noose.”
“It’s a hysterical world. I lost my job for teaching his kid some music. Now Hillman is raising the ante. What’s the rap this time?”
“There is no rap if the boy is safe. You said he was. Didn’t you?”
No answer, but he looked at me under his arm. He had tears in his eyes.
“For God’s sake, Sam, we ought to be able to get together on this. You like the boy, you don’t want anything bad to happen to him. That’s all I have in mind.”
“There’s bad and bad.” But he lowered his defensive arm and kept on studying my face.
“I know there’s bad and bad,” I said. “The line between them isn’t straight and narrow. The difference between them isn’t black and white. I know you favor Tom against his father. You don’t want him cut off from you or your kind of music. And you think I want to drag him back to a school where he doesn’t belong.”
“Aren’t you?”
“I’m trying to save his life. I think you can help me.”
“How?”
“Let’s sit down again and talk quietly the way we were. Come on. And stop seeing Hillman when you look at me.”
Jackman returned to the bed and I sat near him.
“Well, Sam, have you seen him in the last two days?”
“See who? Mr. Hillman?”
“Don’t go into the idiot act again. You’re an intelligent man. Just answer my question.”
“Before I do, will you answer one of mine?”
“If I possibly can.”
“When you say you’re trying to save his life, you mean save him from bad influences, don’t you, put him back in Squaresville with all the other squares?”
“Worse things can happen to a boy.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“You could have asked a better one. I mean save him from death. He’s in the hands of people who may or may not decide to kill him, depending on how the impulse takes them. Am I telling you anything you don’t know?”
“You sure are, man.” His voice was sincere, and his eyes filled up with compunction. But he and I could talk for a year, and he would still be holding something back. Among the things he was holding back was the fact that he didn’t believe me.
“Why don’t you believe me, Sam?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You don’t have to. You’re acting it out, by sitting on the information you have.”
“I ain’t sittin’ on nothin’, ‘ceptin’ this here old raunchy bed,” he said in broad angry parody.
“Now I know you are. I’ve got an ear for certain things, the way you’ve got an ear for music. You play the trombone, don’t you?”
“Yeah.” He looked surprised.
“I hear you blow well.”
“Don’t flatter me. I ain’t no J. C. Higginbotham.”
“And I ain’t no Sherlock Holmes. But sooner or later you’re going to tell me when you saw Tommy Hillman last. You’re not going to sit on your raunchy ole bed and wait for the television to inform you that they found Tommy’s body in a ditch.”
“Did they?”
“Not yet. It could happen tonight. When did you see him?” He drew a deep breath. “Yesterday. He was okay.”
“Did he come here?”
“No sir. He never has. He stopped in at The Barroom Floor yesterday afternoon. He came in the back way and only stayed five minutes.”
“What was he wearing?”
“Slacks and a black sweater. He told me once his mother knitted that sweater for him.”
“Did you talk to him yesterday afternoon?”
“I played him a special riff and he came up and thanked me. That was all. I didn’t know he was on the run. Shucks, he even had his girl friend with him.”
“Stella?”
“The other one. The older one.”
“What’s her name?”
“He never told me. I only seen her once or twice before that. Tommy knew I wouldn’t approve of him squiring her around. She’s practically old enough to be his mother.”
“Can you describe her?”
“She’s a bottle blonde, with a lot of hair, you know how they’re wearing it now.” He swept his hand up from his wrinkled forehead. “Blue eyes, with a lot of eye shadow. It’s hard to tell what she looks like under all that makeup.”
I got out my notebook and made some notes. “What’s her background?”
“Show business, maybe. Like I say, I never talked to her. But she has the looks.”
“I gather she’s attractive.”
“She appears to be to Tom. I guess she’s his first. A lot of young boys start out with an older woman. But,” he added under his breath, “he could do better than that.”
“How old is she?”
“Thirty, anyway. She didn’t show me her birth certificate. She dresses younger—skirts up over her knees. She isn’t a big girl, and maybe in some lights she can get away with the youth act.”
“What was she wearing yesterday?”
“A dark dress, blue satin or something like that, with sequins on it, a neckline down to here.” He touched his solar plexus. “It grieved me to see Tom with his arm around her.”
“How did she seem to feel about him?”
“You’re asking me more than I can answer. He’s a good-looking boy, and she makes a show of affection. But I don’t need X-ray eyes to know what is in her mind.”
“Would she be a hustler?”
“Could be.”
“Did you ever see her with any other man?”
“I never did. I only saw her once or twice with Tom.”
“Once, or twice?”
He ruminated. “Twice before yesterday. The first time was two weeks ago yesterday. That was a Sunday, he brought her to our jam session that afternoon. The woman had been drinking and first she wanted to sing and then she wanted to dance. We don’t allow dancing at these sessions, you have to pay cabaret tax. Somebody told her that and she got mad and towed the boy away.”
“Who told her not to dance?”
“I disremember. One of the cats sitting around, I guess, they object to dancing. The music we play Sundays isn’t to dance to, anyway. It’s more to the glory of God,” he said surprisingly.
“What about the second time you saw her?”
He hesitated, thinking. “That was ten nights ago, on a Friday. They came in around midnight and had a sandwich. I drifted by their table, at the break, but Tom didn’t introduce me or ask me to sit down. Which was all right with me. They seemed to have things to talk about.”
“Did you overhear any part of their conversation?”
“I did.” His face hardened. “She needed money, she was telling him, money to get away from her husband.”
“You’re sure you heard that?”
“Sure as I’m sitting here.”
“What was Tom’s attitude?”
“Looked to me like he was fascinated.”
“Had he been drinking?”
“She was. He didn’t drink. They don’t serve drinks to minors at the Floor. No sir. She had him hyped on something worse than drink.”
“Drugs?”
“You know what I mean.” His hands moulded a woman’s figure in the air.
“You used the word ‘hyped.’ ”
“It was just a manner of speaking,” he said nervously, rubbing his upper arm through the shirt sleeve.
“Are you on the needle?”
“No sir. I’m on the TV,” he said with a sudden downward smile.
“Show me your arms.”
“I don’t have to. You got no right.”
“I want to test your veracity. Okay?”
He unbuttoned his cuffs and pushed his sleeves up his thin yellow arms. The pitted scars in them were old and dry.
“I got out of Lexington seven years ago,” he said, “and I haven’t fallen since, I thank the good Lord.”
He touched his scars with a kind of reverence. They were like tiny extinct volcanoes in his flesh. He covered them up.
“You’re doing all right, Mr. Jackman. With your background, you’d probably know if Tom was on drugs.”
“I probably would. He wasn’t. More than once I lectured him on the subject. Musicians have their temptations. But he took my lectures to heart.” He shifted his hand to the region of his heart. “I ought to of lectured him on the subject of women.”
“I never heard that it did much good. Did you ever see Tom and the blonde with anyone else?”
“No.”
“Did he introduce her to anyone?”
“I doubt it. He was keeping her to himself. Showing her off, but keeping her to himself.”
“You don’t have any idea what her name is?”
“No. I don’t.”
I got up and thanked him. “I’m sorry if I gave you a rough time.”
“I’ve had rougher.”
Chapter 7
DACK’S AUTO COURT was on the edge of the city, in a rather rundown suburb named Ocean View. The twelve or fifteen cottages of the court lay on the flat top of a bluff, below the highway and above the sea. They were made of concrete block and painted an unnatural green. Three or four cars, none of them recent models, were parked on the muddy gravel.
The rain had let up and fresh yellow light slanted in from a hole in the west, as if to provide a special revelation of the ugliness of Dack’s Auto Court. Above the hutch marked “Office,” a single ragged palm tree leaned against the light. I parked beside it and went in.
A hand-painted card taped to the counter instructed me to “Ring for Proprietor.” I punched the handbell beside it. It didn’t work.
Leaning across the counter, I noticed on the shelf below it a telephone and a metal filing box divided into fifteen numbered sections. The registration card for number seven was dated three weeks before, and indicated that “Mr. and Mrs. Robt. Brown” were paying sixteen dollars a week for that cottage. The spaces provided on the card for home address and license number were empty.
The screen door creaked behind me. A big old man with a naked condor head came flapping into the office. He snatched the card from my fingers and looked at me with hot eyes. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“I was only checking.”
“Checking what?”
“To see if some people I know are here. Bob Brown and his wife.”
He held the card up to the light and read it, moving his lips laboriously around the easy words. “They’re here,” he said without joy. “Leastways, they were this morning.”
He gave me a doubtful look. My claim of acquaintanceship with the Browns had done nothing for my status. I tried to improve it. “Do you have a cottage vacant?”
“Ten of them. Take your pick.”
“How much?”
“Depends on if you rent by the day or the week. They’re three-fifty a day, sixteen a week.”
“I’d better check with the Browns first, see if they’re planning to stay.”
“I wouldn’t know about that. They been here three weeks.” He had a flexible worried mouth in conflict with a stupid stubborn chin. He stroked his chin as if to educate it. “I can let you have number eight for twelve a week single. That’s right next door to the Browns’ place.”
“I’ll check with them.”
“I don’t believe they’re there. You can always try.”
I went outside and down the dreary line of cottages. The door of number seven was locked. Nobody answered my repeated rapping.
When I turned away, the old man was standing in front of number eight. He beckoned to me and opened the door with a flourish:
“Take a look. I can let you have it for ten if you really like it.”
I stepped inside. The room was cold and cheerless. The inside walls were concrete block, and the same unnatural green as the outside. Through a crack in the drawn blind, yellow light slashed at the hollow bed, the threadbare carpet. I’d spent too many nights in places like it to want to spend another.
“It’s clean,” the old man said.
“I’m sure it is, Mr. Dack.”
“I cleaned it myself. But I’m not Dack, I’m Stanislaus. Dack sold out to me years ago. I just never got around to having the signs changed. What’s the use? They’ll be tearing everything down and putting up high-rise apartments pretty soon.” He smiled and stroked his bald skull as if it was a kind of golden egg. “Well, you want the cottage?”
“It really depends on Brown’s plans.”
“If I was you,” he said, “I wouldn’t let too much depend on him.”
“How is that, Mr. Stanislaus?”
“He’s kind of a blowtop, ain’t he? I mean, the way he treats that little blonde wife. I always say these things are between a man and his wife. But it rankles me,” he said. “I got a deep respect for women.”
“So have I. I’ve never liked the way he treated women.”
“I’m glad to hear that. A man should treat his wife with love and friendship. I lost my own wife several years ago, and I know what I’m talking about. I tried to tell him that, he told me to mind my own business. I know he’s a friend of yours—”
“He’s not exactly a friend. Is he getting worse?”
“Depends what you mean, worse. This very day he was slapping her around. I felt like kicking him out of my place. Only, how would that help her? And all she did was make a little phone call. He tries to keep her cooped up like she was in jail.” He paused, listening, as if the word jail had associations for him. “How long have you known this Brown?”
“Not so long,” I said vaguely. “I ran into him in Los Angeles.”
“In Hollywood?”
“Yeah. In Hollywood.”
“Is it true she was in the movies? She mentioned one day she used to be in the movies. He told her to shut up.”
“Their marriage seems to be deteriorating.”
“You can say that again.” He leaned toward me in the doorway. “I bet you she’s the one you’re interested in. I see a lot of couples, one way and another, and I’m willing to bet you she’s just about had her fill of him. If I was a young fellow like you, I’d be tempted to make her an offer.” He nudged me; the friction seemed to warm him. “She’s a red-hot little bundle.”
“I’m not young enough.”
“Sure you are.” He handled my arm, and chuckled. “It’s true she likes ’em young. I been seeing her off and on with a teen-ager, even.”
I produced the photograph of Tom that Elaine Hillman had given me. “This one?”
The old man lifted it to the daylight, at arm’s length. “Yeah. That’s a mighty good picture of him. He’s a good-looking boy.” He handed the photograph back to me, and fondled his chin. “How do you come to have a picture of him?”
I told him the truth, or part of it: “He’s a runaway from a boarding school. I’m a private detective representing the school.”
The moist gleam of lechery faded out of Stanislaus’s eyes. Something bleaker took its place, a fantasy of punishment perhaps. His whole face underwent a transformation, like quick-setting concrete.
“You can’t make me responsible fo
r what the renters do.”
“Nobody said I could.”
He didn’t seem to hear me. “Let’s see that picture again.” I showed it to him. He shook his head over it. “I made a mistake. My eyes ain’t what they used to be. I never seen him before.”
“You made a positive identification.”
“I take it back. You were talking to me under false pretenses, trying to suck me in and get something on me. Well, you got nothing on me. It’s been tried before,” he said darkly. “And you can march yourself off my property.”
“Aren’t you going to rent me the cottage?”
He hesitated a moment, saying a silent goodbye to the ten dollars. “No sir, I want no spies and peepers in my place.”
“You may be harboring something worse.”
I think he suspected it, and the suspicion was the source of his anger.
“I’ll take my chances. Now you git. If you’re not off my property in one minute, I’m going to call the sheriff.”
That was the last thing I wanted. I’d already done enough to endanger the ransom payment and Tom’s return. I got.
Chapter 8
A BLUE SPORTS CAR stood in the drive behind the Hillman Cadillac. An athletic-looking young man who looked as if he belonged in the sports car came out of the house and confronted me on the front steps. He wore an Ivy League suit and had an alligator coat slung over his arm and hand, with something bulky and gun-shaped under it.
“Point that thing away from me. I’m not armed.”
“I w-want to know who you are.” He had a faint stammer.
“Lew Archer. Who are you?”
“I’m Dick Leandro.” He spoke the words almost questioningly, as if he didn’t quite know what it meant to be Dick Leandro.
“Lower that gun,” I reminded him. “Try pointing it at your leg.”
He dropped his arm. The alligator coat slid off it, onto the flagstone steps, and I saw that he was holding a heavy old revolver. He picked up the coat and looked at me in a rather confused way. He was a handsome boy in his early twenties, with brown eyes and dark curly hair. A certain little dancing light in his eyes told me that he was aware of being handsome.
“Since you’re here,” I said, “I take it the money’s here, too.”
The Far Side of the Dollar Page 7