“He had a gun?” Betty said in a small, high voice.
“Yeah, it was in the pocket of his jacket. He kept it out of sight but you can’t hide a big heavy gun like that.” He leaned across the bar and peered into Betty’s eyes. “What’s the matter with him, anyway, Miss Truttwell? He never acted like this before.”
“He’s in trouble,” she said.
“Does the dame have anything to do with his trouble? The blonde dame? She drinks like she’s got a hollow leg. She shouldn’t be making him drink.”
“Do you know who she is, Marco?”
“No. But she looks like trouble to me. I don’t know what he thinks he’s doing with her.”
Betty started for the door, then turned back to Marco again. “Why didn’t you take the gun away from him?”
“I don’t fool around with guns, Miss. That isn’t my department.”
We went out to Betty’s two-seater in the parking lot. The club was on a cove of the Pacific, and I caught a whiff of the sea. It was a raw and rueful smell, conjuring up the place where I had found Sidney Harrow.
Betty and I were both silent and thoughtful as she drove up the long hill to the Montevista Inn. The young man in the office remembered me.
“You’re just in time if you want to see Mrs. Trask. She’s getting ready to leave.”
“Did she say why?”
“I think she’s had bad news. It must be serious, because she didn’t even put up an argument when I had to charge her for an extra day. They usually put up an argument.”
I made my way through the oak grove and tapped on the screen door of the stucco cottage.
The inner door was open, and Jean Trask answered from the bedroom: “My bags are ready, if you want to carry them out.”
I crossed the living room and entered the bedroom. The woman was sitting at the dressing table, shakily applying lipstick.
Our eyes met in the mirror. Her hand wandered, describing a red clown mouth around her real one. She turned and got up clumsily, upsetting her stool.
“They sent you for my bags?”
“No. But I’ll be glad to carry them.” I picked up her matched blue bags. They were light enough.
“Put them down,” she said. “Who are you anyway?”
She was ready to be afraid of anyone for any reason—so full of fear that some of it slopped over into me. Her huge red mouth alarmed me. Chilly laughter convulsed my stomach.
“I asked about you at the office,” she said. “They told me they don’t have a security guard. So what are you doing here?”
“At the moment I’m looking for Nick Chalmers. We don’t have to beat around the bush. You must know he’s in serious emotional trouble.”
She answered as if she was glad to have someone to talk to: “He certainly is. He’s talking about suicide. I thought a couple of drinks would do him good. They only made him worse.”
“Where is he now?”
“I made him promise to go home and sleep it off. He said he would.”
“Home to his apartment?”
“I guess so.”
“You’re pretty vague, Mrs. Trask.”
“I try to keep myself that way. It’s less painful,” she added wryly.
“How did you get so interested in Nick?”
“It’s none of your business. And I’m not taking any static from you.”
Her voice rose as she gained confidence in her own anger. But a steady trill of fear ran through it.
“What are you so afraid of, Mrs. Trask?”
“Sidney Harrow got himself zapped last night.” Her voice was rough with self-concern. “You must know that.”
“How do you happen to know it?”
“Nick told me. I’m sorry I ever opened this can of worms.”
“Did he kill Sidney?”
“I don’t think he knows—that’s how far off base he is. And I’m not waiting around to find out.”
“Where are you going?”
She refused to tell me.
I went back to Betty and told her what I had learned, or part of it. We decided to go out to the university community in separate cars. My car was where it was supposed to be, in front of the Sunset Motor Motel. There was a parking ticket under the windshield wiper.
I tried to follow Betty’s red two-seater, but she drove too fast for me, close to ninety on the straightaway. She was waiting for me when I reached the parking lot of the Cambridge Arms.
She ran toward me. “He’s here. At least that’s his car.”
She pointed at a blue sports car standing beside her red one. I went and touched the hood. The engine was hot. The key was in the ignition.
“You stay down here,” I said.
“No. If he makes trouble—I mean he won’t if I’m there.”
“That’s a thought.”
We went up together in the elevator. Betty knocked on Nick’s door and called his name. “This is Betty.”
There was a long waiting silence. Betty knocked again. Abruptly the door was pulled open. She took an involuntary step into the room, and ended up with her face against Nick’s chest. He held her with one hand and with the other he pointed a heavy revolver at my stomach.
I couldn’t see his eyes, which were hidden by dark wraparound glasses. In contrast, his face was very pale. His hair was uncombed and hung down over his forehead. His white shirt was dirty. My mind recorded these things as if they might add up to my last sight of the world. I felt resentment more than fear. I hated the idea of dying for no good reason at the hands of a mixed-up overgrown boy I didn’t even know.
“Drop it,” I said routinely.
“I don’t take orders from you.”
“Come on now, Nick,” Betty said.
She moved closer to him, trying to use her body to distract him. Her right arm slid around his waist, and she pressed one thigh forward between his legs. She raised her left arm as if she was going to loop it around his neck. Instead she brought it sharply down on his gun arm.
The revolver was pointing at the floor now. I dove for it and wrenched it out of his hand.
“Damn you!” he said. “Damn you both!”
A boy with a high voice or a girl with a low one came out of the apartment across the hall. “What’s going on?”
“Initiation,” I said.
Nick tore himself loose from Betty and swung at my face. I shifted and let his fist go by. I lowered my head and bulled him backward into his living room. Betty shut the door and leaned on it. Her color was high. She was breathing through her mouth.
Nick came at me again. I went under his fists and hit him solidly in the solar plexus. He lay down gasping for breath.
I spun the cylinder of his revolver. One shell had been fired. It was a Colt .45. I got out my black notebook and made a record of its number.
Betty moved between us. “You didn’t have to hurt him.”
“Yes I did. But he’ll get over it.”
She kneeled beside him and touched his face with her hand. He rolled away from her. The sounds he made fighting for breath gradually subsided. He sat up with his back against the chesterfield.
I sat on my heels facing him, and showed him his revolver. “Where did you get this, Nick?”
“I don’t have to answer that. You can’t make me incriminate myself.”
His voice had a queer inhuman tone, as if it was being played back on tape. I couldn’t tell what the tone meant. His eyes were effectively masked by the wrap-around glasses.
“I’m not a policeman, Nick, if that’s what you think.”
“I don’t care what you are.”
I tried again. “I’m a private detective working on your side. But I’m not quite clear what your side is. Do you want to talk about it?”
He shook his head like a child in a tantrum, whipping it rapidly from side to side until his hair blurred out. Betty said in a pained voice:
“Please don’t do that, Nicholas. You’ll hurt your neck.”
She smo
othed his hair with her fingers. He sat perfectly still.
“Let me look at you,” she said.
She took off his dark glasses. He grabbed for them, but she held them out of his reach. His eyes were black and glistening like asphalt squeezed from a crevice. They seemed to be leading a strange life of their own, with an inward look and an outward look alternating anxiety and aggression. I could understand why he wore the glasses to hide his sad changing eyes.
He covered his eyes with his hands and peered between his fingers.
“Please don’t do that, Nick.” The girl was kneeling beside him again. “What happened? Please tell me what happened.”
“No. You wouldn’t love me any more.”
“Nothing could stop me loving you.”
“Even if I killed somebody?” he said between his hands. “Did you kill somebody?” I said.
He nodded slowly, once, keeping his head down and his face hidden.
“With this revolver?”
His head jerked downward in the affirmative. Betty said: “He’s in no condition to talk. You mustn’t force him.”
“I think he wants to get it off his chest. Why do you suppose he phoned you from the club?”
“To say goodbye.”
“This is better than saying goodbye. Isn’t it?” She answered soberly: “I don’t know. I don’t know how much I can stand.”
I turned to Nick again. “Where did you get the revolver?”
“It was in his car.”
“Sidney Harrow’s car?”
He dropped his hands from his face. His eyes were puzzled and fearful. “Yes. It was in his car.”
“Did you shoot him in his car?”
His whole face clenched like a frightened baby’s getting ready to cry. “I don’t remember.” He struck himself on the forehead with his fist. Then he struck himself in the mouth, hard.
“You’re tormenting him,” the girl said. “Can’t you see he’s sick?”
“Stop mothering him. He already has a mother.”
His head came up in a startled movement. “You mustn’t tell my mother. Or my father. Dad will kill me.”
I made no promises. His parents would have to be told. “You were going to tell me where the shooting occurred, Nick.”
“Yes. I remember now. We went to the hobo jungle back of Ocean Boulevard. Someone had left a fire burning and we sat by the coals. He wanted me to do a bad thing.” His voice was naïve, like a child’s. “I took his gun and shot him.”
He made another scowling baby-face, so tight that it hid his eyes. He began to sob and moan, but no tears came. It was hard to watch his dry crying.
Betty put her arms around him. I said across the rhythms of his noise:
“He’s had breakdowns before, hasn’t he?”
“Not like this.”
“Did he stay at home, or was he hospitalized?”
“Home.” She spoke to Nick. “Will you come home with me?”
He said something that might have been yes. I called the Chalmerses’ number and got the servant, Emilio. He brought Irene Chalmers to the phone.
“This is Archer. I’m with your son in his apartment. He’s not in a good way, and I’m bringing him home.”
“Is he hurt?”
“He’s mentally hurt, and talking about suicide.”
“I’ll get in touch with his psychiatrist,” she said. “Dr. Smitheram.”
“Is your husband there?”
“He’s in the garden. Do you want to talk to him?”
“It isn’t necessary. But you’d better prepare him for this.”
“Can you handle Nick?”
“I think so. I have Betty Truttwell with me.”
Before we left the apartment I called the Bureau of Criminal Investigation in Sacramento. I gave the number of the revolver to a man I knew named Roy Snyder. He said he’d try to check the name of the original owner. When we went down to my car I put the revolver in the trunk, locked in an evidence case.
chapter 8
We rode in my car, with Betty driving and Nick on the front seat between us. He didn’t speak or move until we stopped in front of his parents’ house. Then he begged me not to make him go in.
I had to use a little force to get him out of the car. With one hand on his arm, and Betty walking on his far side, I marched him across the courtyard. He moved with deep reluctance, as if we planned to stand him up against the white wall and execute him.
His mother came out before we reached the front door. “Nick? Are you all right?”
“I’m okay,” he said in his tape-recorder tone.
As we moved into the reception hall she said to me: “Do you have to talk to my husband?”
“Yes I do. I asked you to prepare him.”
“I just couldn’t do it,” she said. “You’ll have to tell him yourself. He’s in the garden.”
“What about the psychiatrist?”
“Dr. Smitheram had a patient with him, but he’ll be here in a little while.”
“You’d better call John Truttwell, too,” I said. “This thing has legal angles.”
I left Nick with the two women in the living room. Betty was solemn and quiet, as if Irene Chalmers’s dark beauty cast a shadow over her.
Chalmers was in the walled garden, working among the plants. In clean, sun-faded Levis he looked thin, almost fragile. He was digging vigorously with a spade around some bushes which had been cut back for the winter and looked like dead thorny stumps.
He glanced up sharply at me, then slowly straightened, striking his spade upright in the earth. Greek and Roman statues stood around like nudists pitted by years of inclement weather.
Chalmers said rather severely: “I thought it was understood that the Florentine box was not insured.”
“I wouldn’t know about that, Mr. Chalmers. I’m not in the insurance business.”
He got a little pale and tense. “I understood you to say you were.”
“It was your wife’s idea. I’m a private detective. John Truttwell called me in on your wife’s behalf.”
“Then he can damn well call you off again.” Chalmers did a mental double take. “You mean my wife went to Truttwell behind my back?”
“It wasn’t such a bad idea. I know you’re concerned about your son, and I just brought him home. He’s been running around with a gun, talking very loosely about suicide and murder.”
I filled Chalmers in on what had been said and done. He was appalled. “Nick must be out of his mind.”
“He is to a certain extent,” I said. “But I don’t think he was lying.”
“You believe he committed a murder?”
“A man named Sidney Harrow is dead. There was bad blood between him and Nick. And Nick has admitted shooting him.”
Chalmers swayed slightly and leaned on his spade, head down. There was a bald spot on the crown of his head, with a little hair brushed over it as if to mask his vulnerability. The moral beatings that people took from their children, I was thinking, were the hardest to endure and the hardest to escape.
But Chalmers wasn’t thinking of himself. “Poor Nick. He was doing so well. What’s happened to him?”
“Maybe Dr. Smitheram can tell you. It seems to have started with the gold box. Apparently Nick took it from your safe and gave it to a woman named Jean Trask.”
“I never heard of her. What would she want with my mother’s gold box?”
“I don’t know. It seems important to her.”
“Have you talked to this Trask woman?”
“Yes, I have.”
“What did she do with my letters to my mother?”
“I don’t know. I looked in the box, but it was empty.”
“Why didn’t you ask her?”
“She’s a difficult woman to deal with. And more important things kept coming up.”
Chalmers bit his mustache in chagrin. “Such as?”
“I learned that she hired Sidney Harrow to come to Pacific Point. Apparently
they were searching for her father.”
Chalmers gave me a puzzled look which wandered across the garden and over the wall to the sky. “What has all this got to do with us?”
“It isn’t clear, I’m afraid. I have a suggestion, subject to John Truttwell’s approval. And yours, of course. It might be a good idea to turn the gun over to the police and let them make ballistics tests.”
“You mean give up without a fight?”
“Let’s take this a step at a time, Mr. Chalmers. If it turns out that Nick’s gun didn’t kill Harrow, his confession is probably fantasy. If it did kill Harrow, we can decide then what to do next.”
“We’ll take it up with John Truttwell. I don’t seem to be thinking too clearly.” Chalmers put his fingers to his forehead.
“It still wouldn’t be hopeless,” I said, “even if Nick did kill him. I believe there may have been mitigating circumstances.”
“How so?”
“Harrow had been throwing his weight around. He threatened Nick with a gun, possibly the same gun. This happened in front of your house the other night, when the box was stolen.”
Chalmers gave me a doubtful look. “I don’t see how you can possibly know that.”
“I have an eyewitness.” But I didn’t name her.
“Do you have the gun with you?”
“It’s in the trunk of my car. I’ll show it to you.”
We went through a screened lanai into the house and down a corridor to the reception hall. Nick and his mother and Betty were sitting in a stiff little group on a sofa in the living room, like people at a party that had died some time ago. Nick had put on his dark glasses again, like a black bandage over his eyes.
Chalmers went into the living room and stood in front of him looking down as if from a great height. “Is it true that you shot a man?”
Nick nodded dully. “I’m sorry. I didn’t want to come home. I meant to kill myself.”
“That’s cowardly talk,” Chalmers said. “You’ve got to act like a man.”
“Yes, Dad,” he said without hope.
“We’ll do everything we can for you. Don’t despair. Promise me that, Nick.”
“I promise, Dad. I’m sorry.”
Chalmers turned with a kind of military abruptness and came back to me. His face was stoical. Both he and Nick must have been aware that no real communication had taken place.
The Goodbye Look Page 5