I didn't want to let him get inside, where taking him would create a public scene that would bring in the police. I needed a chance to talk to him before anyone else did. There wasn't much use in trying to persuade him to come with me. He was lean and quick and could certainly outrun me.
These thoughts went through my head in the second before he reached the door of the station. I put both arms around his waist from behind, lifted him off his feet, and carried him wildly struggling to my car. I pushed him into the front seat and got in beside him. Other cars were going by in the road, but nobody stopped to ask me any questions. They never do any more.
Tom let out a single dry sob or whimper, high in his nose. He must have known that this was the end of running.
`My name is Lew Archer,' I said. `I'm a private detective employed by your father.'
`He isn't my father.'
`An adoptive father is a father, too.'
`Not to me he isn't. I don't want any part of Captain Hillman,' he said with the cold distance of injured youth. `Or you either.'
I noticed a cut on the knuckle of his right hand. It had been bleeding. He put the knuckle in his mouth and sucked it, looking at me over it. It was hard to take him seriously at that moment. But he was a very serious young man.
`I'm not going back to my cruddy so-called parents.'
`You have nobody else.'
`I have myself.'
`You haven't been handling yourself too well.'
`Another lecture.'
`I'm pointing out a fact. If you could look after yourself decently, you might make out a case for independence. But you've been rampaging around clobbering middle-aged doctors-'
`He tried to make me go home.'
`You're going home. The alternative seems to be a life with bums and criminals.'
`You're talking about my parents, my real parents.'
He spoke with conscious drama, but there was also a kind of bitter awe in his voice. `My mother wasn't a bum and she wasn't a criminal. She was-nice.'
`I didn't mean her.'
`And my father wasn't so bad, either,' he said without conviction.
`Who killed them, Tom?'
His face became blank and tight. It looked like a wooden mask used to fend off suffering.
`I don't know anything about it,' he said in a monotone. `I didn't know Carol was dead, even, till I saw the papers last night.
I didn't know Mike was dead till I saw the papers today. Next question.'
`Don't be like that, Tom. I'm not a cop, and I'm not your enemy.
`With the so-called parents I've got, who needs enemies? All my - all Captain Hillman ever wanted was a pet boy around the house, somebody to do tricks. I'm tired to doing tricks for him.'
`You should be tired, after this last trick. It was a honey of a trick.'
He gave me his first direct look, half in anger and half in fear. `I had a right to go with my real parents.'
`Maybe. We won't argue about that. But you certainly had no right to help them extort money from your father.'
`He's not my father.'
`I know that. Do you have to keep saying it?'
`Do you have to keep calling him my father?'
He was a difficult boy. I felt good, anyway. I had him.
'Okay,' I said. `We'll call him Mr. X and we'll call your mother Madam X and we'll call you the Lost Dauphin of France.'
`That isn't so funny.'
He was right. It wasn't.
`Getting back to the twenty-five thousand dollars you helped to take them for, I suppose you know you're an accomplice in a major felony.'
`I didn't know about the money. They didn't tell me. I don't think Carol knew about it, either.'
`That's hard to believe, Tom.'
`It's true. Mike didn't tell us. He just said he had a deal cooking.'
`If you didn't know about the extortion, why did you ride away in the trunk of his car?'
`So I wouldn't be seen. Mike said my dad-' he swallowed the word, with disgust-`he said that Captain
