The Goodbye Look

by Ross Macdonald

  FIRST VINTAGE CRIME/BLACK LIZARD EDITION, DECEMBER 2000

  Copyright © 1969 by Ross Macdonald Copyright renewed 1997 by The Margaret Millar Charitable Remainder Unitrust

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1969.

  Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Crime/Black Lizard and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:

  Macdonald, Ross

  The goodbye look / Ross Macdonald

  1. Archer, Lew (fictitious character)—Fiction.

  2. Private investigators—California—Fiction.

  PZ3.M59943 PS3625.1486

  813.′52

  New York: Alfred A. Knopf

  78-308610

  eISBN: 978-0-307-77262-6

  www.vintagebooks.com

  v3.1

  To Henri Coulette

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  chapter 1

  The lawyer, whose name was John Truttwell, kept me waiting in the outer room of his offices. It gave the room a chance to work me over gently. The armchair I was sitting in was covered in soft green leather. Oil paintings of the region, landscapes and seascapes, hung on the walls around me like subtle advertisements.

  The young pink-haired receptionist turned from the switchboard. The heavy dark lines accenting her eyes made her look like a prisoner peering out through bars.

  “I’m sorry Mr. Truttwell’s running so late. It’s that daughter of his,” the girl said rather obscurely. “He should let her go ahead and make her own mistakes. The way I have.”

  “Oh?”

  “I’m really a model. I’m just filling in at this job because my second husband ran out on me. Are you really a detective?”

  I said I was.

  “My husband is a photographer. I’d give a good deal to know who—where he’s living.”

  “Forget it. It wouldn’t be worth it.”

  “You could be right. He’s a lousy photographer. Some very good judges told me that his pictures never did me justice.”

  It was mercy she needed, I thought.

  A tall man in his late fifties appeared in the open doorway. High-shouldered and elegantly dressed, he was handsome and seemed to know it. His thick white hair was carefully arranged on his head, as carefully arranged as his expression.

  “Mr. Archer? I’m John Truttwell.” He shook my hand with restrained enthusiasm and moved me along the corridor to his office. “I have to thank you for coming down from Los Angeles so promptly, and I apologize for keeping you waiting. Here I’m supposed to be semi-retired but I’ve never had so many things on my mind.”

  Truttwell wasn’t as disorganized as he sounded. Through the flow of language his rather sad cold eyes were looking me over carefully. He ushered me into his office and placed me in a brown-leather chair facing him across his desk.

  A little sunlight filtered through the heavily draped windows, but the room was lit by artificial light. In its diffused whiteness Truttwell himself looked rather artificial, like a carefully made wax image wired for sound. On a wall shelf above his right shoulder was a framed picture of a clear-eyed blonde girl who I supposed was his daughter.

  “On the phone you mentioned a Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence Chalmers.”

  “So I did.”

  “What’s their problem?”

  “I’ll get to that in a minute or two,” Truttwell said. “I want to make it clear at the beginning that Larry and Irene Chalmers are friends of mine. We live across from each other on Pacific Street. I’ve known Larry all my life, and so did our parents before us. I learned a good deal of my law from Larry’s father, the judge. And my late wife was very close to Larry’s mother.”

  Truttwell seemed proud of the connection in a slightly unreal way. His left hand drifted softly over his side hair, as if he was fingering an heirloom. His eyes and voice were faintly drowsy with the past.

  “The point I’m making,” he said, “is that the Chalmerses are valuable people—personally valuable to me. I want you to handle them with great care.”

  The atmosphere of the office was teeming with social pressures. I tried to dispel one or two of them. “Like antiques?”

  “Somewhat, but they’re not old. I think of the two of them as objects of art, the point of which is that they don’t have to be useful.” Truttwell paused, and then went on as if struck by a new thought. “The fact is Larry hasn’t accomplished much since the war. Of course he’s made a great deal of money, but even that was handed to him on a silver platter. His mother left him a substantial nest egg, and the bull market blew it up into millions.”

  There was an undertone of envy in Truttwell’s voice, suggesting that his feelings about the Chalmers couple were complicated and not entirely worshipful. I let myself react to the nagging undertone:

  “Am I supposed to be impressed?”

  Truttwell gave me a startled look, as if I’d made an obscene noise, or allowed myself to hear one. “I can see I haven’t succeeded in making my point. Larry Chalmers’s grandfather fought in the Civil War, then came to California and married a Spanish land-grant heiress. Larry was a war hero himself, but he doesn’t talk about it. In our instant society that makes him the closest thing we have to an aristocrat.” He listened to the sound of the sentence as though he had used it before.

  “What about Mrs. Chalmers?”

  “Nobody would describe Irene as an aristocrat. But,” he added with unexpected zest, “she’s a hell of a good-looking woman. Which is all a woman really has to be.”

  “You still haven’t mentioned what their problem is.”

  “That’s partly because it’s not entirely clear to me.” Truttwell picked up a sheet of yellow foolscap from his desk and frowned over the scrawlings on it. “I’m hoping they’ll speak more freely to a stranger. As Irene laid out the situation to me, they had a burglary at their house while they were away on a long weekend in Palm Springs. It was a rather peculiar burglary. According to her, only one thing of value was taken—an old gold box that was kept in the study safe. I’ve seen that safe—Judge Chalmers had it put in back in the twenties—and it would be hard to crack.”

  “Have Mr. and Mrs. Chalmers notified the police?”

  “No, and they don’t plan to.”

  “Do they have servants?”


  “They have a Spanish houseman who lives out. But they’ve had the same man for over twenty years. Besides, he drove them to Palm Springs.” He paused, and shook his white head. “Still it does have the feel of an inside job, doesn’t it?”

  “Do you suspect the servant, Mr. Truttwell?”

  “I’d rather not tell you whom or what I suspect. You’ll work better without too many preconceptions. Well as I know Irene and Larry, they’re very private people, and I don’t pretend to understand their lives.”

  “Have they any children?”

  “One son, Nicholas,” he said in a neutral tone.

  “How old is he?”

  “Twenty-three or-four. He’s due to graduate from the university this month.”

  “In January?”

  “That’s right. Nick missed a semester in his freshman year. He left school without telling anyone, and dropped out of sight completely for several months.”

  “Are his parents having trouble with him now?”

  “I wouldn’t put it that strongly.”

  “Could he have done this burglary?”

  Truttwell was slow in replying. Judging by the changes in his eyes, he was trying out various answers mentally: they ranged from prosecution to defense.

  “Nick could have done it,” he said finally. “But he’d have no reason to steal a gold box from his mother.”

  “I can think of several possible reasons. Is he interested in women?”

  Truttwell said rather stiffly: “Yes, he is. He happens to be engaged to my daughter Betty.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Not at all. You could hardly be expected to know that. But do be careful what you say to the Chalmerses. They’re accustomed to leading a very quiet life, and I’m afraid this business has really upset them. The way they feel about their precious house, it’s as if a temple had been violated.”

  He crumpled the yellow foolscap in his hands and threw it into a wastebasket. The impatient gesture gave the impression that he would be glad to be rid of Mr. and Mrs. Chalmers and their problems, including their son.

  chapter 2

  Pacific Street rose like a slope in purgatory from the poor lower town to a hilltop section of fine old homes. The Chalmerses’ California Spanish mansion must have been fifty or sixty years old, but its white walls were immaculate in the late-morning sun.

  I crossed the walled courtyard and knocked on the ironbound front door. A dark-suited servant with a face that belonged in a Spanish monastery opened the door and took my name and left me standing in the reception hall. It was an enormous two-storied room that made me feel small and then, in reaction, large and self-assertive.

  I could see into the great white cave of the living room. Its walls were brilliant with modern paintings. Its doorway was equipped with black wrought-iron gates, shoulder high, which gave the place a museum atmosphere.

  This was partly dispelled by the dark-haired woman who came in from the garden to greet me. She was carrying a pair of clippers and a clear red Olé rose. She laid the clippers down on a hall table but kept the rose, which exactly matched the color of her mouth.

  Her smile was bright and anxious. “Somehow I expected you to be older.”

  “I’m older than I look.”

  “But I asked John Truttwell to get me the head of the agency.”

  “I’m a one-man agency. I co-opt other detectives when I need them.”

  She frowned. “It sounds like a shoestring operation to me. Not like the Pinkertons.”

  “I’m not big business, if that’s what you want.”

  “It isn’t. But I want somebody good, really good. Are you experienced in dealing with—well—” Her free hand indicated first herself and then her surroundings—“people like me?”

  “I don’t know you well enough to answer that.”

  “But you’re the one we’re talking about.”

  “I assume Mr. Truttwell recommended me, and told you I was experienced.”

  “I have a right to ask my own questions, don’t I?”

  Her tone was both assertive and lacking in self-assurance. It was the tone of a handsome woman who had married money and social standing and never could forget that she might just as easily lose these things.

  “Go ahead and ask questions, Mrs. Chalmers.”

  She caught my gaze and held it, as if she were trying to read my mind. Her eyes were black and intense and impervious.

  “All I really want to know is this. If you find the Florentine box—I assume John Truttwell told you about the gold box?”

  “He said that one was missing.”

  She nodded. “Assuming you find it, and find out who took it, is that as far as it goes? I mean, you won’t march off to the authorities and tell them all about it?”

  “No. Unless they’re already involved?”

  “They aren’t, and they’re not going to be,” she said. “I want this whole thing kept quiet. I wasn’t even going to tell John Truttwell about the box, but he wormed it out of me. However, him I trust. I think.”

  “And me you think you don’t?”

  I smiled, and she decided to respond. She tapped me on the cheek with her red rose, then dropped it on the tile floor as if it had served its purpose. “Come into the study. We can talk privately there.”

  She led me up a short flight of steps to a richly carved oak door. Before she closed it behind us I could see the servant in the reception hall picking up after her, first the clippers, then the rose.

  The study was an austere room with dark beams supporting the slanting white ceiling. The single small window, barred on the outside, made it resemble a prison cell. As if the prisoner had been looking for a way out, there were shelves of old law books against one wall.

  On the facing wall hung a large picture which appeared to be an oil painting of Pacific Point in the old days, done in primitive perspective. A seventeenth-century sailing vessel lay in the harbor inside the curve of the point; beside it naked brown Indians lounged on the beach; over their heads Spanish soldiers marched like an army in the sky.

  Mrs. Chalmers seated me in an old calf-covered swivel chair in front of a closed roll-top desk.

  “These pieces don’t go with the rest of the furniture,” she said as if it mattered. “But this was my father-in-law’s desk, and that chair you’re sitting in was the one he used in court. He was a judge.”

  “So Mr. Truttwell told me.”

  “Yes, John Truttwell knew him. I never did. He died a long time ago, when Lawrence was just a small boy. But my husband still worships the ground his father walked on.”

  “I’m looking forward to meeting your husband. Is he at home?”

  “I’m afraid not. He went to see the doctor. This burglary business has him all upset.” She added: “I wouldn’t want you to talk to him, anyway.”

  “Does he know I’m here?”

  She moved away from me, leaning over a black oak refectory table. She fumbled a cigarette from a silver box and lit it with a matching table lighter. The cigarette, which she puffed on furiously, laid down a blue smokescreen between us.

  “Lawrence didn’t think it was a good idea to use a private detective. I decided to go ahead with you anyway.”

  “Why did he object?”

  “My husband likes his privacy. And this box that was stolen—well, it was a gift to his mother from an admirer of hers. I’m not supposed to know that, but I do.” Her smile was crooked. “In addition to which, his mother used it to keep his letters in.”

  “The admirer’s letters?”

  “My husband’s letters. Larry wrote her a lot of letters during the war, and she kept them in the box. The letters are missing, too—not that they’re of any great value, except maybe to Larry.”

  “Is the box valuable?”

  “I think it is. It’s covered with gold, and very carefully made. It was made in Florence during the Renaissance.” She stumbled on the word, but got it out. “It has a picture on the lid, of two lovers.”


  “Insured?”

  She shook her head, and crossed her legs. “It hardly seemed necessary. We never took it out of the safe. It never occurred to us that the safe could be broken into.”

  I asked to be allowed to see the safe. Mrs. Chalmers took down the primitive painting of the Indians and the Spanish soldiers. Where it had hung a large cylindrical safe was set deep in the wall. She turned the dial several times and opened it. Looking over her shoulder, I could see that the safe was about the diameter of a sixteen-inch gun and just as empty.

  “Where’s your jewelry, Mrs. Chalmers?”

  “I don’t have much, it never has interested me. What I do have, I keep in a case in my room. I took the case along with me to Palm Springs. We were there when the gold box was taken.”

  “How long has it been missing?”

  “Let me see now, this is Tuesday. I put it in the safe Thursday night. Next morning we went to the desert. It must have been stolen after we left, so that makes four days, or less. I looked in the safe last night when we got home, and it was gone.”

  “What made you look in the safe last night?”

  “I don’t know. I really don’t,” she added, making it sound like a lie.

  “Did you have some idea that it might be stolen?”

  “No. Certainly not

  What about the servant?”

  “Emilio didn’t take it. I can vouch for him, absolutely.”

  “Was anything taken besides the box?” She considered the question. “I don’t think so. Except the letters, of course, the famous letters.”

  “Were they important?”

  “They were important to my husband, as I said. And of course to his mother. But she’s been dead a long time, since the end of the war. I never met her myself.” She sounded a little worried, as if she’d been denied a maternal blessing, and still felt defrauded.

  “Why would a burglar take them?”

  “Don’t ask me. Probably because they were in the box.” She made a face. “If you do find them, don’t bother to bring them back. I’ve already heard them, or most of them.”

  “Heard them?”

  “My husband used to read them aloud to Nick.”

  “Where is your son?”

  “Why?”