`Soon. I'll talk to you in the morning.'
`What do we do in the meantime?'
`Carry on.'
`If you say so.'
Arnie hung up on me and left me feeling a little shaky. Six hundred dollars was what I got for working a full week, and I didn't work every week. I had about three hundred dollars in the bank, about two hundred in cash. I owned an equity in the car and some clothes and furniture. My total net worth, after nearly twenty years in the detective business, was in the neighborhood of thirty-five hundred dollars. And Ralph Hillman, with his money, was letting me finance my own search for his son.
On the other hand, I answered my self-pity; I was doing what I wanted to be doing. I wanted to take the man who had taken me.
I wanted to find Tom. I couldn't drop the case just as it was breaking. And I needed Arnie to backstop me in Nevada. Carry on.
I made a second collect call, to Lieutenant Bastian. It was long past midnight, but he was still on duty in his office. I told him I was bringing in a witness, and I gave him a capsule summary of what the witness was going to say. Bastian expressed a proper degree of surprise and delight.
Harold was still in the bedroom, standing pensively beside the tie rack attached to the closet door. He was fully dressed except for a tie.
`What kind of a tie do you think I ought to wear? Lila always picks out the tie I wear.'
`You don't need a tie.'
`They'll be taking my picture, won't they? I've got to be properly dressed.'
He fingered the tie rack distraughtly.
I chose one for him, a dark blue tie with a conservative pattern, the kind you wear to the funerals of friends. We closed up the house and garage and drove south out of Long Beach.
It was less than an hour's drive to Pacific Point. Harold was intermittently talkative, but his silences grew longer. I asked him about his and his brother's early life in Idaho. It had been a hard life, in an area subject to blizzards in the winter and floods in the spring and extreme heat in the summer. Their father believed that boys were a kind of domestic animal that ought to be put to work soon after weaning. They were hoeing corn and digging potatoes when they were six, and milking the cows at eight or nine.
They could have stood the work, if it hadn't been for the punishment that went with it. I'd seen Harold's scars. The old man used a piece of knotted wire on them. Mike was the first to run away. He lived in Pocatello for a couple of years with a man named Robert Brown, a high-school coach and counselor who took him in and tried to give him a chance.
Robert Brown was Carol's father. Mike paid him back for his kindness eventually by running away with his daughter.
`How old was Mike then?'
`Twenty or so. Let's see, it was about a year after they drafted him into the Navy. Yeah, he'd be about twenty. Carol was only sixteen.'
`Where were you at the time?'
`Working here in Los Angeles. I was 4-F. I had a job taking pictures for a hotel.'
`The Barcelona Hotel,' I said.
`That's right.'
He sounded a little startled by my knowledge of his life. `It wasn't much of a job, but it gave me a chance to freelance on the side.'
`I understand that Carol and your brother stayed there, too.'
`For a little. That was when he was AWOL and hiding out. I let them use my room for a couple of weeks.'
`You've done a lot for your brother in your time.'
`Yeah. He paid me back by trying to frame me for stealing a Navy camera. There's one extra thing I could have done for him.'
`What was that?'
`I could have drowned him in the river when he was a kid. That's all the use he's been to anybody. Especially Carol.'
`Why did she stick to him?'
He groaned. `She wanted to, I guess.'
`Were they married?'
He answered slowly. `I think so. She thought so. But I never saw any papers to prove it.'
`Lately,' I said, `they've been calling themselves Mr. and Mrs. Robert Brown. The car he left with you is registered to Robert Brown.'
`I wondered where he got it. Now I suppose I'll have to give it back to the old guy.'
`First the police will be wanting it.'
