“Not even Brown,” I said. “He thought she was alive at nine-thirty last night. He talked to her through the door, trying to get her to open up. Or he may have been trying to con himself into thinking he hadn’t killed her after all. I don’t think he’s too stable.”
Bastian looked up sharply. “Were you in the cottage when Brown was talking through the door?”
“I was. Incidentally, I recognized his voice. He’s the same man who extorted twenty-five thousand dollars from Ralph Hillman last night. I listened in on a phone call he made to Hillman yesterday.”
Bastian’s right fist was still clenched. He used it to strike the desk top, savagely. The pigeons on the window ledge flew away.
“It’s too damn bad,” he said, “you didn’t bring us in on this yesterday. You might have saved a life, not to mention twenty-five thousand dollars.”
“Tell that to Hillman.”
“I intend to. This morning. Right now I’m telling you.”
“The decision wasn’t mine. I tried to change it. Anyway, I entered the case after the woman was killed.”
“That’s a good place to begin,” Bastian said after a pause. “Go on from there. I want the full record.”
He reached down beside his desk and turned on a recorder. For an hour or more the tape slithered quietly from wheel to wheel as I talked into it. I was clientless and free and I didn’t suppress anything. Not even the possibility that Tom Hillman had cooperated with Brown in extorting money from his father.
“I’d almost like to think that that was true,” Bastian said. “It would mean that the kid is still alive, anyway. But it isn’t likely.”
“Which isn’t likely?”
“Both things. I doubt that he hoaxed his old man, and I doubt that he’s still alive. It looks as if the woman was used as a decoy to get him in position for the kill. We’ll probably find his body in the ocean week after next.”
His words had the weight of experience behind them. Kidnap victims were poor actuarial risks. But I said:
“I’m working on the assumption that he’s alive.”
Bastian raised his eyebrows. “I thought Dr. Sponti took you off the case.”
“I still have some of his money.”
Bastian gave me a long cool appraising look. “L. A. was right. You’re not the usual peeper.”
“I hope not.”
“If you’re staying with it, you can do something for me, as well as for yourself. Help me to get this woman identified.” He slid the picture of Mrs. Brown out from under the magnifying glass. “This postmortem photo is too rough to circularize. But you could show it around in the right circles. I’m having a police artist make a composite portrait, but that takes time.”
“What about fingerprints?”
“We’re trying that, too, but a lot of women have never been fingerprinted. Meantime, will you try and get an identification? You’re a Hollywood man, and the woman claimed that she was in pictures at one time.”
“That doesn’t mean a thing.”
“It might.”
“But I was planning to try and pick up Brown’s trail in Nevada. If the boy’s alive, Brown knows where to find him.”
“The Nevada police already have our APB on Brown. And you have a private operative on the spot. Frankly, I’d appreciate it if you’ll take this picture to Hollywood with you. I don’t have a man I can spare. By the way, I had your car brought into the county garage.”
Cooperation breeds cooperation. Besides, the woman’s identity was important, if only because the killer had tried to hide it. I accepted the picture, along with several others taken from various angles, and put them in the same pocket as my picture of Tom.
“You can reverse any telephone charges,” Bastian said in farewell.
Halfway down the stairs I ran into Ralph Hillman. At first glance he looked fresher than he had the previous evening. But it was an illusory freshness. The color in his cheeks was hectic, and the sparkle in his eyes was the glint of desperation. He sort of reared back when he saw me, like a spooked horse.
“Can you give me a minute, Mr. Hillman?”
“Sorry. I have an appointment.”
“The lieutenant can wait I want to say this. I admit I made a mistake last night. But you made a mistake in getting Sponti to drop me.”
He looked at me down his patrician nose. “You’d naturally think so. It’s costing you money.”
“Look, I’m sorry about last night. I was overeager. That’s the defect of a virtue. I want to carry on with the search for your son.”
“What’s the use? He’s probably dead. Thanks to you.”
“That’s a fairly massive accusation, Mr. Hillman.”
“Take it. It’s yours. And please get out of my way.” He looked compulsively at his wristwatch. “I’m already late.”
He brushed past me and ran upstairs as if I might pursue him. It wasn’t a pleasant interview. The unpleasantness stuck in my crop all the way to Los Angeles.
Chapter 11
I BOUGHT A HAT a size too large, to accommodate my bandages, and paid a brief visit to the Hollywood division of the L. A. P. D. None of the detective-sergeants in the upstairs offices recognized Mrs. Brown in her deathly disguise. I went from the station to the news room of the Hollywood Reporter. Most of the people at work there resented being shown such pictures. The ones who gave them an honest examination failed to identify Mrs. Brown.
I tried a number of flesh peddlers along the Strip, with the same lack of success and the same effect. The photographs made me unpopular. These guys and dolls pursuing the rapid buck hated to be reminded of what was waiting on the far side of the last dollar. The violence of the woman’s death only made it worse. It could happen to anybody, any time.
I started back to my office. I intended to call Bastian and ask him to rush me a Xerox copy of the composite sketch as soon as his artist had completed it. Then I thought of Joey Sylvester.
Joey was an old agent who maintained an office of sorts two blocks off Sunset and two flights up. He hadn’t been able to adapt to the shift of economic power from the major studios to the independent producers. He lived mainly on his share of residuals from old television movies, and on his memories.
I knocked on the door of his cubbyhole and heard him hiding his bottle, as if I might be the ghost of Louis B. Mayer or an emissary from J. Arthur Rank. Joey looked a little disappointed when he opened the door and it was only me. But he resurrected the bottle and offered me a drink in a paper cup. He had a glass tumbler for his own use, and I happened to know that nearly every day he sat at his desk and absorbed a quart of bourbon and sometimes a quart and a half.
He was a baby-faced old man with innocent white hair and crafty eyes. His mind was like an old-fashioned lamp with its wick in alcohol, focused so as to light up the past and its chauffeur-driven Packard, and cast the third-floor-walkup present into cool shadow.
It wasn’t long past noon, and Joey was still in fair shape. “It’s good to see you, Lew boy. I drink to your health.” He did so, with one fatherly hand on my shoulder.
“I drink to yours.”
The hand on my shoulder reached up and took my hat off. “What did you do to your head?”
“I was slightly shot last night.”
“You mean you got drunk and fell down?”
“Shot with a gun,” I said.
He clucked. “You shouldn’t expose yourself the way you do. Know what you ought to do, Lew boy? Retire and write your memoirs. The unvarnished sensational truth about Hollywood.”
“It’s been done a thousand times, Joey. Now they’re even doing it in the fan mags.”
“Not the way you could do it. Give ’em the worm’s-eye view. There’s a title!” He snapped his fingers. “I bet I could sell your story for twenty-five G’s, make it part of a package with Steve McQueen. Give some thought to it, Lew boy. I could open up a lovely jar of olives for you.”
“I just opened a can of peas, Joey, and I won
der if you can help me with it. How is your tolerance for pictures of dead people?”
“I’ve seen a lot of them die.” His free hand fluttered toward the wall above his desk. It was papered with inscribed photographs of vanished players. His other hand raised his tumbler. “I drink to them.”
I cluttered his desk top with the angry pictures. He looked them over mournfully. “Ach!” he said. “What the human animal does to itself! Am I supposed to know her?”
“She’s supposed to have worked in pictures. You know more actors than anybody.”
“I did at one time. No more.”
“I doubt that she’s done any acting recently. She was on the skids.”
“It can happen overnight.” In a sense, it had happened to him. He put on his glasses, turned on a desk lamp, and studied the pictures intensively. After a while he said: “Carol?”
“You know her.”
He looked at me over his glasses. “I couldn’t swear to it in court. I once knew a little blonde girl, natural blonde, with ears like that. Notice that they’re small and close to the head and rather pointed. Unusual ears for a girl.”
“Carol who?”
“I can’t remember. It was a long time ago, back in the forties. I don’t think she was using her own name, anyway.”
“Why not?”
“She had a very stuffy family back in Podunk. They disapproved of the acting bit. I seem to remember she told me she ran away from home.”
“In Podunk?”
“I didn’t mean that literally. Matter of fact, I think she came from some place in Idaho.”
“Say that again.”
“Idaho. Is your dead lady from Idaho?”
“Her husband drives a car with an Idaho license. Tell me more about Carol. When and where did you know her?”
“Right here in Hollywood. A friend of mine took an interest in the girl and brought her to me. She was a lovely child. Untouched.” His hands flew apart in the air, untouching her. “All she had was high-school acting experience, but I got her a little work. It wasn’t hard in those days, with the war still going on. And I had a personal in with all the casting directors on all the lots.”
“What year was it, Joey?”
He took off his glasses and squinted into the past. “She came to me in the spring of ’45, the last year of the war.”
Mrs. Brown, if she was Carol, had been around longer than I’d thought. “How old was she then?”
“Very young. Just a child, like I said. Maybe sixteen.”
“And who was the friend who took an interest in her?”
“It isn’t like you think. It was a woman, one of the girls in the story department at Warner’s. She’s producing a series now at Television City. But she was just a script girl back in the days I’m talking about.”
“You wouldn’t be talking about Susanna Drew?”
“Yeah. Do you know Susanna?”
“Thanks to you. I met her at a party at your house, when you were living in Beverly Hills.”
Joey looked startled, as though the shift from one level of the past to another had caught him unawares. “I remember. That must have been ten years ago.”
He sat and thought about ten years ago, and so did I. I had taken Susanna home from Joey’s party, and we met at other parties, by agreement. We had things to talk about. She picked my brains for what I knew about people, and I picked hers for what she knew about books. I was crazy about her insane sense of humor.
The physical thing came more slowly, as it often does when it promises to be real. I think we tried to force it. We’d both been drinking, and a lot of stuff boiled up from Susanna’s childhood. Her father had been a professor at UCLA, who lost his wife young, and he had supervised Susanna’s studies. Her father was dead, but she could still feel his breath on the back of her neck.
We had a bad passage, and Susanna stopped going to parties, at least the ones I went to. I heard she had a marriage which didn’t take. Then she had a career, which took.
“How did she happen to know Carol?” I said to Joey.
“You’ll have to ask her yourself. She told me at the time, but I don’t remember. My memory isn’t what it was.” The present was depressing him. He poured himself a drink.
I refused the offer of one. “What happened to Carol?”
“She dropped out of sight. I think she ran off with a sailor, or something like that. She didn’t have what it takes, anyway, after the first bloom.” Joey sighed deeply. “If you see Susanna, mention my name, will you, Lew? I mean, if you can do it gracefully.” He moved one hand in an undulating horizontal curve. “She acts like she thought I was dead.”
I used Joey’s phone to make a call to Susanna Drew’s office. Her secretary let me talk to her:
“This is Lew Archer, Susanna.”
“How nice to hear from you.”
“The occasion isn’t so nice,” I said bluntly. “I’m investigating a murder. The victim may or may not be a girl you knew back in the forties, named Carol.”
“Not Carol Harley?”
“I’m afraid she’s the one.”
Her voice roughened. “And you say she’s dead?”
“Yes. She was murdered yesterday in a place called Ocean View.”
She was silent for a moment. When she spoke again, her voice was softer and younger. “What can I do?”
“Tell me about your friend Carol.”
“Not on the telephone, please. The telephone dehumanizes everything.”
“A personal meeting would suit me much better,” I said rather formally. “I have some pictures to show you, to make the identification positive. It should be soon. We’re twenty-four hours behind—”
“Come over now. I’ll send your name out front.”
I thanked Joey and drove to Television City. A guard from the front office escorted me through the building to Susanna Drew’s office. It was large and bright, with flowers on the desk and explosive-looking abstract expressionist paintings on the walls. Susanna was standing at the window, crying. She was a slim woman with short straight hair so black the eye stayed on it. She kept her back to me for some time after her secretary went out and closed the door. Finally she turned to face me, still dabbing at her wet cheeks with a piece of yellow Kleenex.
She was fortyish now, and not exactly pretty, but neither did she look like anybody else. Her black eyes, even in sorrow, were furiously alive. She had style, and intelligence in the lines and contours of her face. Legs still good. Mouth still good. It said:
“I don’t know why I’m carrying on like this. I haven’t seen or heard from Carol in seventeen or eighteen years.” She paused. “I really do know, though. ‘It is Margaret I mourn for.’ Do you know Hopkins’s poem?”
“You know I don’t. Who’s Margaret?”
“The girl in the poem,” she said. “She’s grieving over the fallen autumn leaves. And Hopkins tells her she’s grieving for herself. Which is what I’m doing.” She breathed deeply. “I used to be so young.”
“You’re not exactly over the hill now.”
“Don’t flatter me. I’m old old old. I was twenty in 1945 when I knew Carol. Back in the pre-atomic era.” On the way to her desk she paused in front of one of the abstract paintings, as if it represented what had happened to the world since. She sat down with an air of great efficiency. “Well, let me look at your pictures.”
“You won’t like them. She was beaten to death.”
“God. Who would do that?”
“Her husband is the prime suspect.”
“Harley? Is she—was she still with that schmo?”
“Evidently she still was.”
“I knew he’d do her in sooner or later.”
I leaned on the end of her desk. “How did you know that?”
“It was one of those fated things. Elective affinities with a reverse twist. She was a really nice child, as tender as a soft-boiled egg, and he was a psychopathic personality. He just couldn’t leave her alone.
”
“How do you know he was a psychopathic personality?”
“I know a psychopathic personality when I see one,” she said, lifting her chin. “I was married to one, briefly, back in the fabulous fifties. Which constitutes me an authority. If you want a definition, a psychopathic personality is a man you can’t depend on for anything except trouble.”
“And that’s the way Harley was?”
“Oh yes.”
“What was his first name?”
“Mike. He was a sailor, a sailor in the Navy.”
“And what was the name of his ship?”
She opened her mouth to tell me, I believe. But something shifted rapidly and heavily in her mind, and closed off communication. “I’m afraid I don’t remember.” She looked up at me with black opaque eyes.
“What did he do before he went into the Navy? Was he a photographer?”
She looked back over the years. “I think he had been a boxer, a professional boxer, not a very successful one. He may have been a photographer, too. He was the sort of person who had been a number of things, none of them successfully.”
“Are you sure his name wasn’t Harold?”
“Everybody called him Mike. It may have been a nom de guerre.”
“A what?”
“A fighting name. You know.” She breathed deeply. “You were going to show me some pictures, Lew.”
“They can wait. You could help me most right now by telling me what you can remember about Carol and Harley and how you got to know them.”
Tensely, she looked at her watch. “I’m due in a story conference in one minute.”
“This is a more important story conference.”
She breathed in and out. “I suppose it is. Well, I’ll make it short and simple. It’s a simple story, anyway, so simple I couldn’t use it in my series. Carol was a country girl from Idaho. She ran away from home with an awol sailor. Mike Harley came from the same hick town, I think, but he’d already been in the Navy for a couple of years and seen the world. He promised to take her out to the coast and get her into the movies. She was about sixteen and so naïve it made you want to weep or burst out laughing.”
The Far Side of the Dollar Page 10