The Far Side of the Dollar by Ross MacDonald Read Free Book Online

at my head. I caught a glimpse of his red angry mask before he turned away. “It’s quite impossible. Why do you have to torment me with these ideas?”
    “I don’t know your son. You ought to.”
    “He’d never do a thing like that to me.”
    “You put him in Laguna Perdida School.”
    “I had to.”
    “Why?”
    He turned on me furiously. “You keep hammering away at the same stupid question. What has it got to do with anything?”
    “I’m trying to find out just how far gone Tom is. If there was reason to think that he kidnapped himself, to punish you or raise money, we’d want to turn the police loose—”
    “You’re crazy!”
    “Is Tom?”
    “Of course not. Frankly, Mr. Archer, I’m getting sick of you and your questions. If you want to stay in my house, it’s got to be on my terms.”
    I was tempted to walk out, but something held me. The case was getting its hooks into my mind.
    Hillman filled his glass with whisky and drank half of it down.
    “If I were you, I’d lay off the sauce,” I said. “You have decisions to make. This could be the most important day of your life.”
    He nodded slowly. “You’re right.” He reached across the bar and poured the rest of his whisky into the metal sink. Then he excused himself, and went upstairs to see to his wife.

Chapter
5
    I LET MYSELF OUT the front door, quietly, got a hat and raincoat out of the trunk of my car, and walked down the winding driveway. In the dead leaves under the oak trees the drip made rustling noises, releasing smells and memories. When I was seventeen I spent a summer working on a dude ranch in the foothills of the Sierra. Toward the end of August, when the air was beginning to sharpen, I found a girl, and before the summer was over we met in the woods. Everything since had been slightly anticlimactic.
    Growing up seemed to be getting harder. The young people were certainly getting harder to figure out. Maybe Stella Carlson, if I could get to her, could help me understand Tom.
    The Carlsons’ mailbox was a couple of hundred yards down the road. It was a miniature replica, complete with shutters, of their green-shuttered white colonial house, and it rubbed me the wrong way, like a tasteless advertisement. I went up the drive to the brick stoop and knocked on the door.
    A handsome redheaded woman in a linen dress opened the door and gave me a cool green look. “Yes?”
    I didn’t think I could get past her without lying. “I’m in the insurance—”
    “Soliciting is not allowed in El Rancho.”
    “I’m not selling, Mrs. Carlson, I’m a claims adjuster.” I got an old card out of my wallet which supported the statement. I had worked for insurance companies in my time.
    “If it’s about my wrecked car,” she said, “I thought that was all settled last week.”
    “We’re interested in the cause of the accident. We keep statistics, you know.”
    “I’m not particularly interested in becoming a statistic.”
    “Your car already is. I understand it was stolen.”
    She hesitated, and glanced behind her, as if there was a witness in the hallway. “Yes,” she said finally. “It was stolen.”
    “By some young punk in the neighborhood, is that right?”
    She flushed in response to my incitement. “Yes, and I doubt very much that it was an accident. He took my car and wrecked it out of sheer spite.” The words boiled out as if they had been simmering in her mind for days.
    “That’s an interesting hypothesis, Mrs. Carlson. May I come in and talk it over with you?”
    “I suppose so.”
    She let me into the hallway. I sat at a telephone table and took out my black notebook. She stood over me with one hand on the newel post at the foot of the stairs.
    “Do you have anything to support that hypothesis?” I said with my pencil poised.
    “You mean that he wrecked the car deliberately?”
    “Yes.”
    Her white teeth closed on her full red lower lip, and left a brief dent in it. “It’s something you couldn’t make a