The Far Side of the Dollar

by Ross Macdonald

  “I can hear you laughing. When and where did you happen to meet her?”

  “In the early spring of 1945. I was working at Warner’s in Burbank and spending weekends in various places. You know the old Barcelona Hotel near Santa Monica? Carol and Harley were staying there, and it’s where I—well, I got interested in her.”

  “Were they married?”

  “Carol and Harley? I think they’d gone through some sort of ceremony in Tia Juana. At least Carol thought they were married. She also thought Harley was on extended leave, until the Shore Patrol picked him up. They whisked him back to his ship and Carol was left with nothing to live on, literally nothing. Harley hadn’t bothered to make an allotment or anything. So I took her under my wing.”

  “And brought her to see Joe Sylvester.”

  “Why not? She was pretty enough, and she wasn’t a stupid girl. Joey got her a couple of jobs, and I spent a lot of time with her on grooming and diction and posture. I’d just been through an unhappy love affair, in my blue period, and I was glad to have somebody to occupy my mind with. I let Carol share my apartment, and I actually think I could have made something out of her. A really wholesome Marilyn, perhaps.” She caught herself going into Hollywood patter, and stopped abruptly. “But it all went blah.”

  “What happened?”

  “Harley had left her pregnant, and it began to show. Instead of grooming a starlet, I found myself nursing a pregnant teen-ager with a bad case of homesickness. But she refused to go home. She said her father would kill her.”

  “Do you remember her father’s name?”

  “I’m afraid not. She was using the name Carol Cooper for professional purposes, but that wasn’t her true surname. I think her father lived in Pocatello, if that’s any help.”

  “It may be. You say she was pregnant. What happened to the baby?”

  “I don’t know. Harley turned up before the baby was born—the Navy had finally kicked him out, I believe—and she went back to him. This was in spite of everything I could say or do. They were elective affinities, as I said. The Patient Griselda and the nothing man. So seventeen years later he had to kill her.”

  “Was he violent when you knew him?”

  “Was he not.” She crossed her arms over her breast. “He knocked me down when I tried to prevent her from going back to him. I went out to find help. When I got back to my apartment with a policeman they were both gone, with all the money in my purse. I didn’t press charges, and that was the last I saw of them.”

  “But you still care about Carol.”

  “She was nice to have around. I never had a sister, or a daughter. In fact, when I think back, feel back, I never had a happier time than that spring and summer in Burbank when Carol was pregnant. We didn’t know how lucky we were.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, it was a terribly hot summer and the refrigerator kept breaking down and we only had the one bedroom and Carol got bigger and bigger and we had no men in our lives. We thought we were suffering many deprivations. Actually all the deprivations came later.” She looked around her fairly lavish office as if it was a jail cell, then at her watch. “I really have to go now. My writers and director will be committing mayhem on each other.”

  “Speaking of mayhem,” I said, “I’ll ask you to look at these pictures if you can stand it. The identification should be nailed down.”

  “Yes.”

  I spread the photographs out for her. She looked them over carefully.

  “Yes. It’s Carol. The poor child.”

  She had become very pale. Her black eyes stood out like the coal eyes of a snowgirl. She got to her feet and walked rather blindly into an adjoining room, shutting the door behind her.

  I sat at her desk, pinched by her contour chair, and used the phone to ask her secretary to get me Lieutenant Bastian. He was on the line in less than a minute. I told him everything Susanna Drew had told me.

  She came out of the next room and listened to the end of the conversation. “You don’t waste any time,” she said when I hung up.

  “Your evidence is important.”

  “That’s good. I’m afraid it’s taken all I’ve got.” She was still very pale. She moved toward me as if the floor under her feet was teetering. “Will you drive me home?”

  Home was an apartment on Beverly Glen Boulevard. It had a mezzanine and a patio and African masks on the walls. She invited me to make us both a drink, and we sat and talked about Carol and then about Tom Hillman. She seemed to be very interested in Tom Hillman.

  I was becoming interested in Susanna. Something about her dark intensity bit into me as deep as memory. Sitting close beside her, looking into her face, I began to ask myself whether, in my present physical and financial and moral condition, I could take on a woman with all those African masks.

  The damn telephone rang in the next room. She got up, using my knee as a place to rest her hand. I heard her say:

  “So it’s you. What do you want from me now?”

  That was all I heard. She closed the door. Five minutes later, when she came out, her face had changed again. A land of angry fear had taken the place of sorrow in her eyes, as if they had learned of something worse than death.

  “Who was that, Susanna?”

  “You’ll never know.”

  I drove downtown in a bitter mood and bullyragged my friend Colton, the D. A.’s investigator, into asking Sacramento for Harold or Mike Harley’s record, if any. While I was waiting for an answer I went downstairs to the newsstand and bought an early evening paper.

  The murder and the kidnapping were front-page news, but there was nothing in the newspaper story I didn’t already know, except that Ralph Hillman had had a distinguished combat record as a naval aviator and later (after Newport Line School) as a line officer. He was also described as a millionaire.

  I sat in Colton’s outer office trying to argue away my feeling that Bastian had shoved me onto the fringes of the case. The feeling deepened when the word came back from Sacramento that neither a Harold nor a Mike Harley had a California record, not even for a traffic violation. I began to wonder if I was on the track of the right man.

  I drove back to the Strip through late afternoon traffic. It was nearly dusk when I reached my office. I didn’t bother turning on the light for a while, but sat and watched the green sky at the window lose its color. Stars and neons came out. A plane like a moving group of stars circled far out beyond Santa Monica.

  I closed the Venetian blind, to foil snipers, and turned on the desk lamp and went through the day’s mail. It consisted of three bills, and a proposition from the Motel Institute of St. Louis. The Institute offered me, in effect, a job at twenty thousand a year managing a million-dollar convention motel. All I had to do was fill out a registration form for the Institute’s mail-order course in motel management and send it to the Institute’s registrar. If I had a wife, we could register as a couple.

  I sat toying with the idea of filling out the form, but decided to go out for dinner first. I was making very incisive decisions. I decided to call Susanna Drew and ask her to have dinner with me, telling myself that it was in line of business. I could even deduct the tab from my income tax.

  She wasn’t in the telephone book. I tried Information. Unlisted number. I couldn’t afford her anyway.

  Before I went out for dinner by myself, I checked my answering service. Susanna Drew had left her number for me.

  “I’ve been trying to get you,” I said to her.

  “I’ve been right here in my apartment.”

  “I mean before I knew you left your number.”

  “Oh? What did you have in mind?”

  “The Motel Institute of St. Louis is making a very nice offer to couples who want to register for their course in motel management.”

  “It sounds inviting. I’ve always wanted to go out to sunny California and manage a motel.”

  “Good. We’ll have dinner and talk strategy. Television won’t last, you know
that in your heart. None of these avant-garde movements last.”

  “Sorry, Lew. I’d love dinner, another night. Tonight I’m not up to it. But I did want to thank you for looking after me this afternoon. I was in a bad way for a while.”

  “I’m afraid I did it to you.”

  “No. My whole lousy life reared up and did it to me. You and your pictures were just the catalytic agent.”

  “Could you stand a visit from a slightly catalytic agent? I’ll bring dinner from the delicatessen. I’ll buy you a gardenia.”

  “No. I don’t want to see you tonight.”

  “And you haven’t changed your mind about that telephone call you wouldn’t tell me about?”

  “No. There are things about me you needn’t know.”

  “I suppose that’s encouraging in a way. Why did you leave your number for me, then?”

  “I found something that might help you—a picture of Carol taken in 1945.”

  “I’ll come and get it. You haven’t really told me how you met her, you know.”

  “Please don’t come. I’ll send a messenger with it.”

  “If you insist. I’ll wait in my office.” I gave her the address.

  “Lew?” Her voice was lighter and sweeter, almost poignant “You’re not just putting on an act, are you? To try and pry out my personal secrets, I mean?”

  “It’s no act,” I said.

  “Likewise,” she said. “Thank you.”

  I sat in the echoing silence thinking that she had been badly treated by a man or men. It made me angry to think of it I didn’t go out for dinner after all. I sat and nursed my anger until Susanna’s messenger arrived.

  He was a young Negro in uniform who talked like a college graduate. He handed me a sealed manila envelope, which I ripped open.

  It contained a single glossy print, preserved between two sheets of corrugated cardboard, of a young blonde girl wearing a pageboy bob and a bathing suit. You couldn’t pin down the reason for her beauty. It was partly in her clear low forehead, the high curve of her cheek, her perfect round chin; partly in the absolute femaleness that looked out of her eyes and informed her body.

  Wondering idly who had taken the photograph, I turned it over. Rubber-stamped in purple ink on the back was the legend: “Photo Credit: Harold ‘Har’ Harley, Barcelona Hotel.”

  “Will that be all?” the messenger said at the door.

  “No.” I gave him ten dollars.

  “This is too much, sir. I’ve already been paid.”

  “I know. But I want you to buy a gardenia and deliver it back to Miss Drew.”

  He said he would.

  Chapter 12

  1945 WAS A LONG TIME AGO, as time went in California. The Barcelona Hotel was still standing, but I seemed to remember hearing that it was closed. I took the long drive down Sunset to the coastal highway on the off-chance of developing my lead to Harold Harley. Also I wanted to take another look at the building where Harley and Carol had lived.

  It was a huge old building, Early Hollywood Byzantine, with stucco domes and minarets, and curved verandahs where famous faces of the silent days had sipped their bootleg rum. Now it stood abandoned under the bluff. The bright lights of a service station across the highway showed that its white paint was flaking off and some of the windows were broken.

  I parked on the weed-ruptured concrete of the driveway and walked up to the front door. Taped to the glass was a notice of bankruptcy, with an announcement that the building was going to be sold at public auction in September.

  I flashed my light through the glass into the lobby. It was still completely furnished, but the furnishings looked as though they hadn’t been replaced in a generation. The carpet was worn threadbare, the chairs were gutted. But the place still had atmosphere, enough of it to summon up a flock of ghosts.

  I moved along the curving verandah, picking my way among the rain-warped wicker furniture, and shone my light through a french window into the dining room. The tables were set, complete with cocked-hat napkins, but there was dust lying thick on the napery. A good place for ghosts to feed, I thought, but not for me.

  Just for the hell of it, though, and as a way of asserting myself against the numerous past, I went back to the front door and tapped loudly with my flashlight on the glass. Deep inside the building, at the far end of a corridor, a light showed itself. It was a moving light, which came toward me.

  The man who was carrying it was big, and he walked as if he had sore feet or legs. I could see his face now in the upward glow of his electric lantern. A crude upturned nose, a bulging forehead, a thirsty mouth. It was the face of a horribly ravaged baby who had never been weaned from the bottle. I could also see that he had a revolver in his other hand.

  He pointed it at me and flashed the light in my eyes. “This place is closed. Can’t you read?” he shouted through the glass.

  “I want to talk to you.”

  “I don’t want to talk to you. Beat it. Amscray.”

  He waved the gun at me. I could tell from his voice and look that he had been drinking hard. A drunk with a gun and an excuse to use it can be murder, literally. I made one more attempt:

  “Do you know a photographer named Harold Harley who used to be here?”

  “Never heard of him. Now you get out of here before I blow a hole in you. You’re trespashing.”

  He lifted the heavy revolver. I withdrew, as far as the service station across the street. A quick-moving man in stained white coveralls came out from under a car on a hoist and offered to sell me gas.

  “It ought to take ten,” I said. “Who’s the character in the Barcelona Hotel? He acts like he was bitten by a bear.”

  The man gave me a one-sided smile. “You run into Otto Sipe?”

  “If that’s the watchman’s name.”

  “Yeah. He worked there so long he thinks he owns the place.”

  “How long?”

  “Twenty years or more. I been here since the war myself, and he goes back before me. He was their dick.”

  “Hotel detective?”

  “Yeah. He told me once he used to be an officer of the law. If he was, he didn’t learn much. Check your oil?”

  “Don’t bother, I just had it changed. Were you here in 1945?”

  “That’s the year I opened. I went into the service early and got out early. Why?”

  “I’m a private detective. The name is Archer.” I offered him my hand.

  He wiped his on his coveralls before he took it. “Daly. Ben Daly.”

  “A man named Harold Harley used to stay at the Barcelona in 1945. He was a photographer.”

  Daly’s face opened. “Yeah. I remember him. He took a picture of me and the wife to pay for his gas bill once. We still have it in the house.”

  “You wouldn’t know where he is now?”

  “Sorry, I haven’t seen him in ten years.”

  “What was the last you saw of him?”

  “He had a little studio in Pacific Palisades. I dropped in once or twice to say hello. I don’t think he’s there any more.”

  “I gather you liked him.”

  “Sure. There’s no harm in Harold.”

  Men could change. I showed Carol’s picture to Daly. He didn’t know her. “You couldn’t pin down the address in Pacific Palisades for me?”

  He rubbed the side of his face. It needed retreading, but it was a good face. “I can tell you where it is.”

  He told me where it was, on a side street just off Sunset, next door to a short-order restaurant. I thanked him, and paid him for the gas.

  The short-order restaurant was easy to find, but the building next door to it was occupied by a paperback bookstore. A young woman wearing pink stockings and a ponytail presided over the cash register. She looked at me pensively through her eye makeup when I asked her about Harold Harley.

  “It seems to me I heard there was a photographer in here at one time.”

  “Where would he be now?”

  “I haven’
t the slightest idea, honestly. We’ve only been here less than a year ourselves—a year in September.”

  “How are you doing?”

  “We’re making the rent, at least.”

  “Who do you pay it to?”

  “The man who runs the lunch counter. Mr. Vernon. He ought to give us free meals for what he charges. Only don’t quote me if you talk to him. We’re a month behind now on the rent.”

  I bought a book and went next door for dinner. It was a place where I could eat with my hat on. While I was waiting for my steak, I asked the waitress for Mr. Vernon. She turned to the white-hatted short-order cook who had just tossed my steak onto the grill.

  “Mr. Vernon, gentleman wants to speak to you.”

  He came over to the counter, an unsmiling thin-faced man with glints of gray beard showing on his chin. “You said you wanted it bloody. You’ll get it bloody.” He brandished his spatula.

  “Good. I understand you own the store next door.”

  “That and the next one to it.” The thought encouraged him a little. “You looking for a place to rent?”

  “I’m looking for a man, a photographer named Harold Harley.”

  “He rented that store for a long time. But he couldn’t quite make a go of it. There’s too many photographers in this town. He held on for seven or eight years after the war and then gave up on it.”

  “You don’t know where he is now?”

  “No sir, I do not.”

  The sizzling of my steak reached a certain intensity, and he heard it. He went and flipped it with his spatula and came back to me. “You want french frieds?”

  “All right What’s the last you saw of Harley?”

  “The last I heard of him he moved out to the Valley. That was a good ten years ago. He was trying to run his business out of the front room of his house in Van Nuys. He’s a pretty good photographer—he took a fine picture of my boy’s christening party—but he’s got no head for business. I ought to know, he still owes me three months’ rent.”

  Six young people came in and lined up along the counter. They had wind in their hair, sand in their ears, and the word “Surfbirds” stenciled across the backs of their identical yellow sweatshirts. All of them, girls and boys, ordered two hamburgers apiece.