“I doubt that, Mrs. Brown. It takes time to get used to these shocks and changes.”
“More time than I have. More time than I’ll ever have.” She rose impatiently and went to the mantelpiece. One of the trophies standing on it was out of line with the others. She reached up and adjusted its position. “I wonder what Rob thinks he’s doing in the kitchen.”
She didn’t go and find out what he was doing. She stood in an awkward position, one hip out, in front of the empty fireplace. Under her dowdy black dress, the slopes and masses of her body were angry. But nothing that she could do with her body, or her face, could change the essential beauty of the structure. She was trapped in it, as her daughter had been.
“I wish you’d go on with your story, Mrs. Brown.”
“It hardly qualifies as a story.”
“Whatever you want to call it, then. I’m very grateful for the chance to talk to you. It’s the first decent chance I’ve had to get any information about the background of this case.”
“The background hardly matters now, or the foreground either.”
“It does, though. You may tell me something that will help me to find Harley. I take it you’ve seen him and Carol from time to time over the years.”
“I saw him just once more—after that, I wouldn’t give him house room—when he came home from the Navy in the winter of 1944–45. He claimed to be on leave. Actually he was absent without leave. He talked himself back into Rob’s good graces. Rob had been terribly let down when he left town with that ex-policeman, the bribery artist. But my gullible husband fell for his line all over again. He even gave him money. Which Mike used to elope with my only daughter.”
“Why did Carol go with him?”
She scratched at her forehead, leaving faint weals in the clear skin. “I asked her that, the last time she was home, just a couple of months ago. I asked her why she went and why she stuck with him. She didn’t really know. Of course she wanted to get out of Pocatello. She hated Pocatello. She wanted to go out to the coast and break into the movies. I’m afraid my daughter had very childish dreams.”
“Girls of fifteen do.” With a pang, I thought of Stella. The pang became a vaguely formed idea in an unattended area of my mind. Generation after generation had to start from scratch and learn the world over again. It changed so rapidly that children couldn’t learn from their parents or parents from their children. The generations were like alien tribes islanded in time.
“The fact is,” I said, “Carol did make it into the movies.”
“Really? She told me that once, but I didn’t believe her.”
“Was she a chronic liar?”
“No. Mike was the chronic liar. I simply didn’t believe that she could succeed at anything. She never had.”
The woman’s bitterness was getting me down. She seemed to have an inexhaustible reservoir of the stuff. If she had been like this twenty years before, I could understand why Carol had left home at the first opportunity, and stayed away.
“You say you saw Carol just a couple of months ago.”
“Yes. She rode the bus from Lake Tahoe in June. I hadn’t seen her for quite a long time. She was looking pretty bedraggled. God knows what kind of a life he was leading her. She didn’t talk much.”
“It was a chancy life. Harley seems to have lost his job, and they were on their uppers.”
“So she told me. There was the usual plea for money. I guess Rob gave her money. He always did. He tried to pretend afterwards, to me, that he gave her the car, too, but I know better. She took it. Apparently their old car had broken down, and they couldn’t live at Tahoe without a car.”
“How do you know she took it if your husband says she didn’t?”
She showed signs of embarrassment. “It doesn’t matter. They were welcome to the car.” It was her first generous word. She half-spoiled it: “We needed a new one, anyway, and I’m sure she did it on the spur of the moment. Carol always was a very impulsive girl.
“The point is,” she said, “she left without saying goodbye. She took the car to go downtown to the movies and simply never came back. She even left her suitcase in her room.”
“Had there been trouble?”
“No more than the usual trouble. We did have an argument at supper.”
“What about?”
“My grandson. She had no right to put him out for adoption. She said he was her baby to do with as she pleased. But she had no right. If she couldn’t keep him, she should have brought him to us. We could have given him opportunities, an education.” She breathed heavily and audibly. “She said an unforgivable thing to me that evening. She said, did I mean the kind of opportunities she had? And she walked out. I never saw her again. Neither did her father.” Her head jerked forward in emphatic affirmation: “We did give her opportunities. It’s not our fault if she didn’t take advantage of them. It isn’t fair to blame us.”
“You blame each other,” I said. “You’re tearing each other to pieces.”
“Don’t give me that sort of talk. I’ve had enough of it from my husband.”
“I’m merely calling your attention to an obvious fact. You need some kind of an intermediary, a third party, to help straighten out your thinking.”
“And you’re electing yourself, are you?”
“Far from it You need an expert counselor.”
“My husband is a counselor,” she said. “What good has it done him? Anyway, I don’t believe in seeking that kind of help. People should be able to handle their own problems.”
She composed her face and sat down in the armchair again, with great calm, to show me how well she was handling hers.
“But what if they can’t, Mrs. Brown?”
“Then they can’t, that’s all.”
I made one more attempt. “Do you go to church?”
“Naturally I do.”
“You could talk these problems over with your minister.”
“What problems? I’m not aware of any outstanding problems.” She was in despair so deep that she wouldn’t even look up toward the light. I think she was afraid it would reveal her to herself.
I turned to other matters. “You mentioned a suitcase that your daughter left behind. Is it still here in the house?”
“It’s up in her room. There isn’t much in it. I almost threw it out with the trash, but there was always the chance that she would come back for it.”
“May I see it?”
“I’ll go and get it.”
“If you don’t mind, I’d sooner go up to her room.”
“I don’t mind.”
We went upstairs together, with Mrs. Brown leading the way. She turned on the light in a rear bedroom and stood back to let me enter.
The room provided the first clear evidence that she had been hit very hard by Carol’s running away. It was the bedroom of a high-school girl. The flouncy yellow cover on the French provincial bed matched the yellow flounces on the dressing table, where a pair of Kewpie-doll lamps smiled vacantly at each other. A floppy cloth dog with his red felt tongue hanging out watched me from the yellow lamb’s wool rug. A little bookcase, painted white like the bed, was filled with high-school texts and hospital novels and juvenile mysteries. There were college pennants tacked around the walls.
“I kept her room as she left it,” Mrs. Brown said behind me.
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I guess I always thought that she’d come home in the end. Well, she did a few times. The suitcase is in the closet.”
The closet smelled faintly of sachet. It was full of skirts and dresses, the kind girls wore in high school a half-generation before. I began to suspect that the room and its contents had less to do with Carol than with some secret fantasy of her mother’s. Her mother said, as if in answer to my thought:
“I spend a lot of time here in this room. I feel very close to her here. We really were quite close at one time. She used to tell me everything, all about the boys she dated and so on. It
was like living my own high school days over again.”
“Is that good?”
“I don’t know.” Her lips gnawed at each other. “I guess not, because she suddenly turned against me. Suddenly she closed up completely. I didn’t know what went on in her life, but I could see her changing, coarsening. She was such a pretty girl, such a pure-looking girl.” Her mouth was wrenched far off center and it remained that way, as if the knowledge of her loss had fallen on her like a cerebral stroke.
The suitcase was an old scuffed cowhide one with Rob Brown’s initials on it. I pulled it out into the middle of the floor and opened it. Suddenly I was back in Dack’s Auto Court opening Carol’s other suitcase. The same sour odor of regret rose from the contents of this one and seemed to permeate the room.
There was the same tangle of clothes, this time all of them women’s, skirts and dresses and underthings and stockings, a few cosmetics, a paperback book on the divination of dreams. A hand-scrawled piece of paper was stuck in this as a bookmark. I pulled it out and looked at it. It was signed “Your Brother ‘Har.’ ”
DEAR MIKE,
I’m sorry you and Carole are haveing a “tough time” and I enclose a money order for fifty which I hope will help out you have to cash it at a postoffice. I would send more but things are a little “tight” since I got married to Lila shes a good girl but does not believe that blood is thicker than water which it is. You asked me do I like bing married well in some ways I really like it in other ways I dont Lila has very strong ideas of her own. Shes no “sinsational” beauty like Carole is but we get long.
Im sorry you lost your job Mike unskilled jobs are hard to come by in these times I know you are a good bartender and that is a skill you should be able to pick up something in that line even if they are prejudiced like you say. I did look up Mr. Sipe like you asked me to but he is in no position to do anything for anybody hes on the skids himself the Barcelona went bankrupt last winter and now old Sipe is just watchman on the place but he sent his best regards for old time sake he wanted to know if you ever developed a left.
I saw another “freind” of yours last week I mean Captain Hillman I know you bear a grudge there but after all he treated you pretty good he could have sent you to prison for ten years. No Im not rakeing up old recrimations because Hillman could do something for you if he wanted you ought to see the raceing yacht he has thats how I saw him went down to Newport to take some sailing pictures. I bet he has twenty-five thousand in that yacht the guy is loaded. I found out he lives with his wife and boy in Pacific Point if you want to try him for a job hes head of some kind of “smogless industry.”
Well thats about all for now if you deside to come out to “sunny Cal” you know where we live and dont worry Lila will make you welcome shes a good soul “at heart.”
SINCERELY YOURS
Mrs. Brown had come out of her trance and moved toward me with a curious look. “What is that?”
“A letter to Mike from his brother Harold. May I have it?”
“You’re welcome to it.”
“Thank you. I believe it’s evidence. It seems to have started Mike thinking about the possibility of bleeding the Hillmans for money.” And it explained, I thought, why Harold had blamed himself for instigating the crime.
“May I read it?”
I handed it to her. She held it at arm’s length, squinting.
“I’m afraid I need my glasses.”
We went downstairs to the living room, where she put on horn-rimmed reading glasses and sat in her armchair with the letter. “Sipe,” she said when she finished reading it. “That’s the name I was trying to think of before.” She raised her voice and called: “Robert! Come in here.”
Rob Brown answered from the back of the house: “I was just coming.”
He appeared in the doorway carrying a clinking pitcher and three glasses on a tray. He said with a placatory look at his wife: “I thought I’d make some fresh lemonade for the three of us. It’s a warm night.”
“That was thoughtful, Robert. Put it down on the coffee table. Now, what was the name of the ex-policeman that Mike left town with, the first time?”
“Sipe. Otto Sipe.” He flushed slightly. “That man was a bad influence, I can tell you.”
I wondered if he still was. The question seemed so urgent that I drove right back to the airport and caught the first plane out, to Salt Lake City. A late jet from Minneapolis rescued me from a night in the Salt Lake City airport and deposited me at Los Angeles International, not many miles from the Barcelona Hotel, where a man named Sipe was watchman.
Chapter 18
I HAD A GUN in a locked desk drawer in my apartment, and one in my office. The apartment in West Los Angeles was nearer. I went there.
It was in a fairly new, two-story building with a long roofed gallery on which the second-floor apartments opened directly. Mine was the second-floor back. I parked in the street and climbed the outside stairs.
It was the dead dull middle of the night, the static hour when yesterday ended and tomorrow gathered its forces to begin. My own forces were running rather low, but I wasn’t tired. I had slept on the planes. And my case was breaking, my beautiful terrible mess of a case was breaking.
A light shone dimly behind my draped front window, and when I tried the door it was unlocked. I had no family, no wife, no girl. I turned the knob quietly, and slowly and tentatively opened the door.
It seemed I had a girl after all. She was curled up on the studio couch under a blanket which came from my bed. The light from a standing lamp shone down on her sleeping face. She looked so young I felt a hundred years old.
I closed the door. “Hey, Stella.”
Her body jerked under the blanket. Throwing it off, she sat up. She was wearing a blue sweater and a skirt. “Oh,” she said, “It’s you.”
“Who were you expecting?”
“I don’t know. But don’t be cross with me. I was just dreaming something, I forget what, but it was depressing.” Her eyes were still dark with the dream.
“How in the world did you get in here?”
“The manager let me in. I told him I was a witness. He understood.”
“I don’t. A witness to what?”
“Quite a few things,” she said with some spirit. “If you want me to tell you, you can stop treating me like a mentally retarded delinquent. Nobody else does, except my parents.”
I sat on the edge of the studio couch beside her. I liked the girl but at the moment she was an obstruction, and could turn into a serious embarrassment. “Do your parents know you’re here?”
“Of course not. How could I tell them? They wouldn’t have let me come, and I had to come. You ordered me to get in touch with you if I ever heard from Tommy. Your answering service couldn’t find you and finally they gave me your home address.”
“Are you telling me you’ve heard from him?”
She nodded. Her eyes held steady on my face. They were brimming with complex feelings, more womanly than girlish. “He phoned around four o’clock this afternoon. Mother was at the store, and I had a chance to answer the phone myself.”
“Where was he, did he say?”
“Here in—” She hesitated. “He made me promise not to tell anyone. And I’ve already broken my promise once.”
“How did you do that?”
“I put a little note in Mr. Hillman’s mailbox, before I left El Rancho. I couldn’t just leave him dangling, when I knew.”
“What did you tell him?”
“Just that I’d heard from Tommy, and he was alive.”
“It was a kind thing to do.”
“But it broke my promise. He said I wasn’t to tell anyone, especially not his parents.”
“Promises have to be broken sometimes, when there are higher considerations.”
“What do you mean?”
“His safety. I’ve been afraid that Tom was dead. Are you absolutely certain you talked to him?”
“I’m not telli
ng a lie.”
“I mean, you’re sure it wasn’t an impostor, or a tape recording?”
“I’m sure. We talked back and forth.”
“Where was he calling from?”
“I don’t know, but I think it was long distance.”
“What did he say?”
She hesitated again, with her finger raised. “Is it all right for me to tell you, even after I promised?”
“It would be all wrong if you didn’t. You know that, don’t you? You didn’t come all the way here to hold it back.”
“No.” She smiled a little. “He didn’t tell me too much. He didn’t say a word about the kidnappers. Anyway, the fact that he’s alive is the important thing. He said he was sorry I’d been worried about him, but he couldn’t help it. Then he asked me to meet him and bring some money.”
I was relieved. Tom’s need for money implied that he had no part of the payoff. “How much money?”
“As much as I could get hold of in a hurry. He knew it wouldn’t amount to a great deal. I borrowed some from the people at the beach club. The secretary of the club gave me a hundred dollars of her own money—she knows I’m honest. I took a taxi to the bus station. You know, I never rode on a bus before, except the school bus.”
I cut in impatiently: “Did you meet him here in Los Angeles?”
“No. I was supposed to meet him in the Santa Monica bus station at nine o’clock. The bus was a few minutes late, and I may have missed him. He did say on the phone that he mightn’t be able to make it tonight. In which case I was to meet him tomorrow night. He said he generally only goes out at night.”
“Did he tell you where he’s staying?”
“No. That’s the trouble. I hung around the bus station for about an hour and then I tried to phone you and when I couldn’t I took a taxi here. I had to spend the night somewhere.”
“So you did. It’s too bad Tom didn’t think of that.”
“He probably has other things on his mind,” she said in a defensive tone. “He’s been having a terrible time.”
The Far Side of the Dollar Page 16