Griffin rose in a gesture of dismissal.
I got to La Mesa in time for lunch, which I ate in a waterfront café. It was late June, and the place was crowded with women in slacks and men in shorts, displaying sunburned knees. From my table by the window, I could see the yacht harbor. Small sailboats were moving out through the channel with that slow grace that only sailboats have. It was a bright day, and the wind was freshening.
Just for fun, I tried Smith’s description on the waitress who brought my Crab Louie. She shook her hennaed head at me:
“I’m sorry. Even if I did see him – I see so many people.”
She limped away.
I had no better luck in the motels. They stretched for half a mile along the waterfront boulevard: expensive stucco layouts with green swimming pools and greener lawns, shaded by palm trees rattling in the wind. They were happy places for happy people who wanted to live for a little while in a postcard paradise. Some of the people were named Smith, and that took time. None of them was the Smith I was looking for.
Four hours later, four hours of legwork and tonguework which got me nothing, I had worked my way to the end of motel row. Like white birds coming home to roost, the sails were turning back towards the harbor, heeling as they tacked into the channel.
I turned back towards the main street, remembering a small hotel I had missed. It stood on a corner a block away from the boulevard. It was a three-story building with a front of dirty white bricks and an old electric sign which mumbled through its missing bulbs that this was the MADISON HOTEL. The lobby was narrow and dank. There was nobody at the desk. Two old men, facing each other across a card table that had been set up by the front window, were playing checkers as if their lives depended on the outcome. One of them had two kings; the other had three.
I asked the lucky one where the desk clerk was.
“I’m taking care of the desk right now,” he said without looking up. “You want a room?”
“I may at that. Is there a Mr. Smith staying here?”
He raised his head. His eyes were time-washed and shrewd. “What you want with him?”
“I ran into him, he said you might have a room. Most of the motels are full.”
“We got plenty of rooms. Mind if I finish the game, mister, and then I’ll fix you up?”
He moved one of his kings, hastily, as if he had lost interest in the game. The other old man took it. My old man took his opponent’s two kings and got up grinning like a dog.
He disappeared through a door at the back and emerged behind the desk, wearing a green eyeshade. “I can give you a room with a private bath if you want to go to five.”
“We’ll talk about that in a minute. I want to be sure that it’s the same Mr. Smith. Is he a dark man with a broken nose?”
“Uh-huh. He’s the only Smith we got.”
“Is he in his room?”
He glanced at the keyboard behind him. “Not right now. I think he went out for a walk. You want a room or don’t you?”
“Yes. Please. With bath.”
I registered under my own name, gave him a ten-dollar bill and told him to keep the change.
His jaw dropped, displacing his false teeth slightly. He looked as if he was going to eat the money. “What’s this for?”
“For not telling Mr. Smith that I was asking about him. Pass the word to your friend.”
“Cop?”
I improved on this: “Undercover agent.”
“Did Mr. Smith do something?”
“I don’t know. He may be an innocent victim of the conspiracy. I’ve been assigned to keep an eye on him. I’m telling you this much because you’re obviously a man of experience and you have an honest face.”
“You can trust me,” he said. “Is it the dope traffic? We’ve had a lot of it seeping into town these last few years.”
“Could be. My name is Archer, by the way.”
“Gimpel. Jack Gimpel.” He offered me an arthritic hand. “I’m pleased to make your acquaintance, Mr. Archer. I hope there won’t be any trouble, though.”
“I’m here to head off trouble.”
That turned out to be one of my emptier boasts.
We Went on from There
Published in The Archer Files (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, 2015).
The original handwritten manuscript of the 1965 Ross Macdonald novel The Far Side of the Dollar ended with a brief final chapter chapter featuring an exchange between protagonist Lew Archer and another of the book’s characters.
Before having his manuscript typed, the author decided not to include that ultimate scene. Above it, he wrote to his typist: “I think leave off this chapter. Yes, disregard it, please.”
29
“She had a dreadful life,” Susanna said, “and a dreadful end. I would have given her access to her sleeping pills.”
“You can say that because you didn’t have the responsibility. I helped a man to die once, in similar circumstances. It still wakes me up in the middle of the night.”
She studied me across the table. She herself had a slightly convalescent look, and she was wearing a gardenia. It was Saturday night; we were about to have dinner in one of the medium-priced places on Restaurant Row; I had just ordered martinis.
“You’re a curious combination,” she said. “Very hard, and quite soft.”
“Most men are. So are most women.”
“It certainly applies to Elaine Hillman. You know, I can almost sympathize with her. Or empathize. He did almost the same thing to me as he did to her – getting me to take care of Carol, without any hint that he was the father of the child she was carrying. He may even have recruited me for that purpose,” she said, making herself wince.
“I don’t think he’s as cold an operator as that.”
“Don’t you?”
“How do you feel about him, Susanna?”
“I have no feeling whatever about him,” she said with feeling. “I’m much more interested in what’s going to happen to the boy. How can he possibly survive such trouble?”
“He’ll survive. He has some choices now. His father is willing to send him away to prep school. Or he may even spend the next year with his grandfather Rob Brown. I introduced them to each other yesterday, and they seemed to get along. He even has a nice girl waiting for him.”
Susanna gave me a bright opaque look, as if she could think of another male with similar advantages. “Stella is a nice girl. I’m sorry I couldn’t or didn’t stay with her the other morning. I felt–” She fumbled with a spoon in some embarrassment.
“You felt Ralph Hillman’s needs were overriding.”
“No. I simply felt he had a right–”
“The droit du seigneur?”
“You’re being unpleasant,” she said. “And I was so looking forward to seeing you.”
“I’m trying to get certain things out of the way. Then we can go on from there.”
“Can we?”
“We can try. You haven’t told me what you and Ralph Hillman talked about at breakfast. Did he know his wife had killed those people?”
“Maybe he did. He didn’t say anything about it.”
“If he knew, it would explain his asking you to marry him, as well as something he did Thursday night. He suddenly told me about his fling with Carol, and the fact that Tom was his son. I think he was feeding me evidence of Elaine’s guilt. He wanted her to be found out, even if it meant that he was found out, too.”
“And then he was going to marry me and live happily ever after.” She looked quite pale and haunted for a moment.