We went out the front door. On the sidewalk Chalmers looked down at his gardening clothes self-consciously.
“I hate to appear like this in public,” he said, as if the neighbors might be watching him.
I opened the trunk of my car and showed him the revolver without removing it from the evidence case. “Have you ever seen it before?”
“No. As a matter of fact Nick never owned a gun. He’s always detested the whole business of guns.”
“Why?”
“I suppose he got it by osmosis from me. My father taught me to hunt when I was a boy. But the war destroyed my pleasure in hunting.”
“I hear you had quite a lot of war experience.”
“Who told you that?”
“John Truttwell.”
“I wish John would keep his own counsel. And mine. I prefer not to talk about my part in the war.” He looked down at the revolver with a kind of sad contempt, as if it symbolized all the forms of violence. “Do you really think we should entrust this gun to John?”
“What do you suggest?”
“I know what I’d like to do. Bury it ten feet deep and forget about it.”
“We’d only have to dig it up again.”
“I suppose you’re right,” he said.
Truttwell’s Cadillac came into view, far down Pacific Street. He parked it in front of his own house and came across the street at a half-trot. He absorbed the bad news about Nick as if his mind had been tuned in to receive it.
“And this is the gun. It’s loaded.” I handed him the case with the key in the lock. “You better take charge of it until we decide what to do. I have a query in on its original ownership.”
“Good.” He turned to Chalmers. “Where’s Nick?”
“In the house. We’re expecting Dr. Smitheram.”
Truttwell laid his hand on Chalmers’s bony shoulder. “Too bad you and Irene have to go through it again.”
“Please. We won’t discuss it.” Chalmers pulled away from Truttwell’s hand. He turned abruptly and marched in his stoical way toward the front door.
I followed Truttwell across the street to his house. In his study, he locked the evidence case in a fireproof steel cabinet. I said:
“I’m glad to get that off my hands. I didn’t want Lackland to catch me with it.”
“Do you think I should turn it over to him today?”
“Let’s see what Sacramento says about ownership. What did you mean, by the way, about Chalmers going through it all again? Has Nick been in this kind of trouble before?”
Truttwell took his time about answering. “It depends on what you mean by this kind of trouble. He’s never been mixed up in a homicide before, at least not to my knowledge. But he’s had one or two episodes—isn’t that what the psychiatrists call them? A few years ago he ran away, and it took a nationwide search to bring him home.”
“Was he on the hippie kick?”
“Not really. Actually he was trying to support himself. When the Pinkertons finally tracked him down on the east coast, he was working as a busboy in a restaurant. We managed to persuade him that he should come home and finish his education.”
“How does he feel about his parents?”
“He’s very close to his mother,” Truttwell said dryly, “if that’s desirable. I think he idolizes his father, but feels he can’t measure up. Which is exactly how Larry Chalmers felt about his own father, the Judge. I suppose these patterns have to go on repeating themselves.”
“You mentioned more than one episode,” I prompted him.
“So I did.” He sat down facing me. “It goes much further back, fourteen or fifteen years, and it may be the root of Nick’s trouble. Dr. Smitheram seems to think so. But beyond a certain point he won’t discuss it with me.”
“What happened?”
“That’s what Smitheram won’t discuss. I think Nick was picked up by some sort of sexual psychopath. His family got him back in a hurry, but not before Nick was frightened out of his wits. He was only eight years old at the time. You can understand why nobody likes to talk about it.”
I wanted to ask Truttwell some more questions, but the housekeeper tapped on the study door and opened it. “I heard you come in, Mr. Truttwell. Is there anything I can get you?”
“No thanks, Mrs. Glover. I’m going right out again. Where’s Betty, by the way?”
“I don’t know, sir.” But the woman looked at me, rather accusingly.
“She’s at the Chalmers house,” I said.
Truttwell got to his feet, his entire body making an angry gesture. “I don’t like that at all.”
“It couldn’t be helped. She was with me when I took Nick. She handled herself very well. And handled him.”
Truttwell struck his thigh with his fist. “I didn’t bring her up to be nurse to a psycho.”
The housekeeper had a terrified expression. She withdrew and closed the door without any sound.
“I’m going over there and bring her home,” Truttwell said. “She’s wasted her entire girlhood on that weakling.”
“She doesn’t seem to think it was all waste.”
“So you’re on his side?” He sounded like a rival.
“No. I’m on Betty’s side, and probably yours. This is a hell of a time to force a decision on her.”
Truttwell got the message after a moment’s thought. “You’re right, of course.”
chapter 9
Before he left the house, Truttwell filled a pipe and lit it with a kitchen match. I stayed behind in his study to make a phone call to Roy Snyder in Sacramento. It was five minutes to five by my watch, and I was just in time to catch Snyder before he quit for the night.
“Archer again. Do you have any information on the ownership of the Colt?”
“Yes, I do. It was bought new by a Pasadena man named Rawlinson. Samuel Rawlinson.” Snyder spelled out the surname. “He made the purchase in September of 1941, and at the same time he got a permit to carry it from the Pasadena police. The permit was allowed to lapse in 1945. That’s all I have.”
“What reason did Rawlinson give for carrying a gun?”
“Business protection. He was the president of a bank,” Snyder added dryly. “The Pasadena Occidental Bank.”
I thanked him and dialed Pasadena Information. The Pasadena Occidental Bank was not listed, but Samuel Rawlinson was.
I put in a person-to-person call to Rawlinson. A woman answered. Her voice was rough and warm.
“I’m sorry,” she explained to the operator. “It’s hard for Mr. Rawlinson to come to the phone. Arthritis.”
“I’ll talk to her,” I said.
“Go ahead, sir,” the operator said.
“This is Lew Archer. Who am I talking to?”
“Mrs. Shepherd. I look after Mr. Rawlinson.”
“Is he ill?”
“He’s old,” she said. “We all get old.”
“You’re so right, Mrs. Shepherd. I’m trying to trace possession of a gun which Mr. Rawlinson bought in 1941. A .45 Colt revolver. Will you ask him what he did with it?”
“I’ll ask him.”
She left the phone for a minute or two. It was a noisy line, and I could hear distant babblings, scraps of conversation fading just before I could grasp their meaning.
“He wants to know who you are,” Mrs. Shepherd said. “And what right you have to ask him about any gun.” She added apologetically: “I’m only quoting what Mr. Rawlinson said. He’s a stickler.”
“So am I. Tell him I’m a detective. The gun may or may not have been used last night to commit a crime.”
“Where?”
“In Pacific Point.”
“He used to spend his summers there,” she said. “I’ll ask him again.” She went away and came back. “I’m sorry, Mr. Archer, he won’t talk. But he says if you want to come here and explain what it’s all about, he’ll discuss it with you.”
“When?”
“This evening if you want. He never goes out even
ings. The number is 245 on Locust Street.”
I said I’d be there as soon as I could make it.
I was in my car, ready to go, when I realized I couldn’t leave just yet. A black Cadillac convertible with a medical caduceus was parked just ahead of me. I wanted to have a word with Dr. Smitheram.
The front door of the Chalmers house was standing open, as if its security had been breached. I walked into the reception hall. Truttwell stood with his back to me, arguing with a large balding man who had to be the psychiatrist. Lawrence and Irene Chalmers were on the fringes of the argument.
“The hospital is contraindicated,” Truttwell was saying. “We can’t be sure what the boy will say, and hospitals are always full of leaks.”
“My clinic isn’t,” the large man said.
“Possibly, just possibly, it isn’t. Even so, if you or one of your employees were asked a question in court, you’d have to answer it. Unlike the legal profession—”
The doctor interrupted Truttwell: “Has Nick committed a crime of some sort?”
“I’m not going to answer that question.”
“How can I look after a patient without information?”
“You have plenty of information, more than I have.” Truttwell’s voice seemed to buzz with an old resentment. “You’ve sat on that information for fifteen years.”
“At least you recognize,” Smitheram said, “that I haven’t gone running to the police with it.”
“Would the police be interested, doctor?”
“I’m not going to answer that question.”
The two men faced each other in a quiet fury. Lawrence Chalmers tried to say something to them but they paid no attention.
His wife moved toward me, and drew me to one side. Her eyes were dull and unsurprised, as if she’d been hit by something that she’d seen coming from a long way off.
“Dr. Smitheram wants to take Nick to his clinic. What do you think we should do?”
“I agree with Mr. Truttwell. Your son needs legal security as well as medical.”
“Why?” she said bluntly.
“He killed a man last night, he says, and he’s been talking about it quite freely.”
I paused to let the fact sink in. She handled it almost as if she’d been expecting it. “Who is the man?”
“Sidney Harrow is his name. He was involved in the theft of your Florentine box. So was Nick, apparently.”
“Nick was?”
“I’m afraid so. With all these things on his mind, I don’t think you should put him in any kind of clinic or hospital. Hospitals are always full of leaks, as Truttwell says. Couldn’t you keep him at home?”
“Who would watch him?”
“You and your husband.”
She glanced at her husband, appraisingly. “Maybe. I don’t know if Larry is up to it. It doesn’t show but he’s terribly emotional, especially where Nick is concerned.” She moved closer, letting me feel the influence of her body. “Would you, Mr. Archer?”
“Would I what?”
“Stand watch over Nick tonight?”
“No.” The word came out hard and definite.
“We’re paying your salary, you know.”
“And I’ve been earning it. But I’m not a psychiatric nurse.”
“I’m sorry I asked you.”
There was a sting in her words. She turned her back on me and moved away. I decided I’d better get out of town before she had me fired. I went and told John Truttwell where I was going and why.
Truttwell’s argument with the doctor had cooled down. He introduced me to Smitheram, who gave me a soft handclasp and a hard look. There was a troubled intelligence in his eyes.
I said: “I’d like to ask you some questions about Nick.”
“This isn’t the time or the place.”
“I realize that, doctor. I’ll see you at your office tomorrow.”
“If you insist. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a patient to attend to.”
I followed him as far as the living-room gates, and glanced in. Betty and Nick were sitting on a rug, not together but near each other. Her body was turned toward him, supported by one straight arm. Nick’s face was pressed against his own raised knees.
Neither of them seemed to move, even to breathe. They looked like people lost in space, frozen forever in their separate poses, his of despair, hers of caring.
Dr. Smitheram went and sat down near them on the floor.
chapter 10
I drove inland by way of Anaheim. It was a bad time of day, and in places the traffic crawled like a wounded snake. It took me ninety minutes to get from Chalmers’s house to Rawlinson’s house in Pasadena.
I parked in front of the place and sat for a minute, letting the freeway tensions drip off my nerve ends. It was one of a block of three-storied frame houses. They were ancient, as time went in California, ornamented with turn-of-the-century gables and cupolas.
Half a block further on, Locust Street came to an end at a black-and-white-striped barricade. Beyond it a deep wooded ravine opened. Twilight was overflowing the ravine, flooding the yards, soaking up into the thick yellow sky.
A light showed in Rawlinson’s house as the front door opened and closed. A woman crossed the veranda and came down the steps skipping a broken one.
I saw as she approached my car that she must have been close to sixty. She moved with the confidence of a much younger woman. Her eyes were bright black behind her glasses. Her skin was dark, perhaps with a tincture of Indian or Negro blood. She wore a staid gray dress and a multicolored Mexican apron.
“Are you the gentleman who wants to see Mr. Rawlinson?”
“Yes. I’m Archer.”
“I’m Mrs. Shepherd. He’s just sitting down to dinner and he won’t mind if you join him. He likes to have some company with his food. I only prepared enough for the two of us, but I’ll be glad to pour you a cup of tea.”
“I could use a cup of tea, Mrs. Shepherd.”
I followed her into the house. The entrance hall was impressive if you didn’t look too closely. But the parquetry floor was buckling and loose underfoot, and the walls were dark with mold.
The dining room was more cheerful. Under a yellowing crystal chandelier with one live bulb, a table had been set for one person, with polished silver on a clean white cloth. An old white-headed man in a rusty dinner coat was finishing off what looked like a bowl of beef stew.
The woman introduced me to him. He put his spoon down and struggled to his feet, offering me a gnarled hand. “Take it easy with my arthritis, please. Sit down. Mrs. Shepherd will get you a cup of coffee.”
“Tea,” she corrected him. “We’re out of coffee.” But she lingered in the room, waiting to hear what was said.
Rawlinson’s eyes had a mica glint. He spoke with impatient directness. “This revolver you telephoned about—I gather it’s been used for some illegal purpose?”
“Possibly. I don’t know that it has.”
“But if it hasn’t you’ve come a long way for nothing.”
“In my job everything has to be checked out.”
“I understand you’re a private detective,” he said.
“That’s correct.”
“Employed by whom?”
“A lawyer named Truttwell in Pacific Point.”
“John Truttwell?”
“Yes. Do you know him?”
“I met John two or three times through one of his clients. That was a long time ago, when he was young and I was middle-aged. It must be close to thirty years—Estelle’s been dead for nearly twenty-four.”
“Estelle?”
“Estelle Chalmers—Judge Chalmers’s widow. She was a hell of a woman.” The old man smacked his lips like a wine-taster.
The woman still lingering by the door was showing signs of distress. “All that is ancient history, Mr. Rawlinson. The gentleman isn’t interested in ancient history.”
Rawlinson laughed. “It’s the only kind of history I know. Where�
��s that tea you were so freely offering, Mrs. Shepherd?” She went out, closing the door with emphasis. He turned to me. “She thinks she owns me. She doesn’t, though. If I don’t have a right to my memories, there isn’t a great deal left at my time of life.”
“I’m interested in your memories,” I said, “specifically in the Colt revolver you bought in September 1941. It was probably used to shoot a man last night.”
“What man?”
“Sidney Harrow was his name.”
“I never heard of him,” Rawlinson said, as if this cast some doubt on Harrow’s reality. “Is he dead?”
“Yes.”
“And you’re trying to connect my gun with his death?”
“Not exactly. It either is connected or it isn’t. I want to know which.”
“Wouldn’t ballistics show?”
“Possibly. The tests haven’t been made yet.”
“Then I think I should wait, don’t you?”
“You certainly should if you’re guilty, Mr. Rawlinson.”
He laughed so hard his upper teeth slipped. He pushed them back into place with thumb and forefinger. Mrs. Shepherd appeared in the doorway with a tea tray.
“What’s so funny?” she asked him.
“You wouldn’t consider it funny, Mrs. Shepherd. Your sense of humor is deficient.”
“Your sense of fittingness is. For an eighty-year-old man who used to be the president of a bank—” She set the tea tray down with a slight clash that completed her thought. “Milk or lemon, Mr. Archer?”
“I’ll take it black.”
She poured our tea in two bone china cups that didn’t match. The rundown elegance of the household made me wonder if Rawlinson was a poor man or a miser; and what in hell had happened to his bank.
“Mr. Archer suspects me of committing a murder,” he said to the woman in a slightly bragging tone.
She didn’t think it was funny at all. Her dark face got darker, grim around the mouth and in the eyes. She turned on Rawlinson fiercely.
“Why don’t you tell him the truth then? You know you gave that revolver to your daughter, and you know the exact date.”
“Be quiet.”
The Goodbye Look Page 6