`But his father-his adoptive father wouldn't want me-'
`I know how it is when you're dealing with an old commander, Doctor. He was your commander at one time, wasn't he?'
`Yes. I was his flight surgeon.'
`You aren't any more, and you can't let Hillman do your thinking for you. Do you tell the police, or do I?'
`I will. I realize we can't let the boy run loose in his condition.'
Just what is his condition?'
`He's very upset and, as I said, violently acting out.'
With his heredity, I thought, that was hardly surprising.
16
I KISSED SUSANNA goodbye and drove down Wilshire through Westwood. I wanted to be at the Santa Monica bus station at nine, just in case Tom showed up, but there was still time for another crack at Ben Daly. I turned down San Vicente toward the coastal highway.
The sun was half down on the horizon, bleeding color into the sea and the sky. Even the front of the Barcelona Hotel was touched with factitious Mediterranean pink. The crowd of onlookers in the driveway had changed and dwindled. There were still a few waiting for something more interesting than their lives to happen.
It was a warm night, and most of them were in beach costume. One man was dressed formally in a dark gray business suit and dark gray felt hat. He looked familiar.
I pulled up the drive on impulse and got out. The man in the dark gray suit was Harold Harley. He was wearing a black tie, which Lila had doubtless chosen for him, and a woebegone expression.
It deepened when he saw me. `Mr. Archer?'
`You can't have forgotten me, Harold.'
`No. It's just that everything looks different, even people's faces. Or that hotel there. It's just a caved-in old dump, and I used to think it was a pretty ritzy place. Even the sky looks different.'
He raised his eyes to the red-stretched sky. `It looks hand-tinted, phony, like there was nothing behind it.'
The little man talked like an artist. He might have become one, I thought, with a different childhood.
`I didn't realize you were so fond of your brother.'
`Neither did I. But it isn't just that. I hate California. Nothing really good ever happened to me in California. Or Mike either.'
He gestured vaguely toward the cluster of official cars. `I wisht I was back in Idaho.'
I drew him away from the little group of onlookers, from the women in slacks and halters which their flesh overflowed, the younger girls with haystacks of hair slipping down their foreheads into their blue-shadowed eyes, the tanned alert looking boys with bleached heads and bleached futures. We stood under a magnolia tree that needed water.
`What happened to your brother started in Idaho, Harold.'
And also what happened to you, or failed to happen.
`You think I don't know that? The old man always said Mike would die on the gallows. Anyway, he cheated the gallows.'
`I talked to your father yesterday.'
Harold started violently, and glanced behind him. `Is he in town?'
`I was in Pocatello yesterday.'
He looked both relieved and anxious. `How is he?'
`Much the same, I gather. You didn't tell me he was one step ahead of the butterfly nets.'
`You didn't ask me. Anyway, he isn't like that all the time.'
`But he had to be committed more than once.'
`Yeah.'
He hung his head. In the final glare of day I could see the old closet dust in the groove of his hat, and the new sweat staining the hatband.
`It's nothing to blame yourself for,' I said. `It explains a lot about Mike.'
`I know. The old man was a terror when Mike was a kid. Maw finally had him committed for what he did to Mike and her. Mike left home and never came back, and who could blame him?'
`But you stayed.'
`For a while. I had a trick of pretending I was some place else, like here in California. I finally came out here and went to photography school.'
I returned to the question that interested me. It was really a series of questions about the interlinked lives that brought Mike Harley and Carol Brown from their beginnings in Idaho to their ends in California. Their beginnings and ends had become clear enough. The middle still puzzled me, as well as the ultimate end that lay ahead in darkness.
