The Far Side of the Dollar la-12

by Ross Macdonald

  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 wonder 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 prepared 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, un-touching 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 naive it made you want to weep or burst out laughing.'

  `I can hear you laughing. When and where did you happen to meet her?'

  `In the early spring of 1945.1 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 was 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 m
e 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.