“I will not. You’re playing tricks with yourself and I won’t let you. You’re a smart man but you don’t have enough to occupy your mind.”
Rawlinson showed no anger. He seemed to be pleased by her almost wifely concern. And his holding back about the gun had been just a game, apparently.
Mrs. Shepherd was the worried one. “Who got shot?”
“A part-time detective named Sidney Harrow.”
She shook her head. “I don’t know who that would be. Drink up your tea while it’s hot. Can I get you a piece of fruitcake, Mr. Archer? There’s some left over from Christmas.”
“No thanks.”
“I’ll have some,” Rawlinson said. “With a scoop of ice cream.”
“We’re out of ice cream.”
“We seem to be out of everything.”
“No, there’s enough to eat. But money only stretches so far.”
She left the room again. With her warmth and energy subtracted, the room changed. Rawlinson looked around it a little uneasily, as if he was feeling the cold weight of his bones.
“I’m sorry she saw fit to sic you onto my daughter. And I hope you won’t go dashing off in her direction now. There’d be no point in it.”
“Why?”
“It’s true I gave Louise the gun in 1945. But it was stolen from her house some years later, in 1954, to be exact.” He recited the dates as if he was proud of his memory. “This is not an ad hoc story.”
“Who stole the gun?”
“How should we know? My daughter’s house was burglarized.”
“Why did you give her the gun in the first place?”
“It’s an old story and a sad one,” he said. “My daughter’s husband abandoned her and left her stranded with Jean.”
“Jean?”
“My granddaughter Jean. The two helpless females were left alone in the house. Louise wanted the gun for protection.” He grinned suddenly. “I think Louise may have been hoping that he would come back.”
“That who would come back?”
“Her husband. My egregious son-in-law Eldon Swain. If Eldon had come back, I have no doubt she’d have shot him. With my blessing.”
“What did you have against your son-in-law?”
He laughed abruptly. “That’s an excellent question. But with your permission I don’t think I’ll answer it.”
Mrs. Shepherd brought us two narrow wedges of cake. She noticed that I wolfed mine.
“You’re hungry. I’ll make you a sandwich.”
“Don’t bother. I’m on my way to dinner.”
“It wouldn’t be any bother.”
Her divided attention made Rawlinson uncomfortable. He said with the air of a comedian: “Mr. Archer wants to know what Eldon Swain did to me. Shall I tell him?”
“No. You’re talking too much, Mr. Rawlinson.”
“Eldon’s defalcations are common knowledge.”
“Not any more they’re not. I say let it lie. We could all be a lot worse off than we are. I told Shepherd the same thing. When you talk about old trouble sometimes you can talk it back to life.”
He reacted with jealous irritation. “I thought your husband was living in San Diego.”
“Randy Shepherd isn’t my husband. He’s my ex.”
“Have you been seeing him?”
She shrugged. “I can’t help it when he comes back for a visit. I do my best to discourage him.”
“So that’s where the ice cream and coffee have been going!”
“It isn’t so. I never give Shepherd a morsel of your food or a cent of your money.”
“You’re a liar.”
“Don’t call me that, Mr. Rawlinson. There are things I won’t put up with, even from you.”
Rawlinson looked quite happy again. He had the woman’s attention, and all her heat, focused on him.
I stood up. “I’ve got to be going.”
Neither of them offered any argument. Mrs. Shepherd accompanied me to the front door. “I hope you got what you came for.”
“Part of it, anyway. Do you know where his daughter lives?”
“Yessir.” She gave me another address in Pasadena. “Just don’t tell her I told you. Mrs. Eldon Swain doesn’t approve of me.”
“You seem to be bearing up under it,” I said. “Is Jean Trask Mrs. Swain’s daughter?”
“Yes. Don’t tell me Jean’s mixed up in all this.”
“I’m afraid so.”
“That’s too bad. I can remember when Jean was an innocent little angel. Jean and my own little girl were best friends for years. Then everything went sour.” She heard herself, and sucked her lips inward. “I’m talking too much myself, bringing the past back to life.”
chapter 11
Louise Swain lived on a poor street off Fair Oaks, between Old Town and the ghetto. A few children of various shades were playing under the light at the corner, islanded in the surrounding darkness.
There was a smaller light on the front porch of Mrs. Swain’s stucco cottage, and a Ford sedan standing at the curb in front of it. The Ford was locked. I shone my flashlight into it. It was registered to George Trask, 4545 Bayview Avenue, San Diego.
I made a note of the address, got out my contact mike, and went around to the side of the stucco cottage, following two strips of concrete which made an exigent driveway. An old black Volkswagen with a crumpled fender stood under a rusty carport. I moved into its shadow and leaned on the wall beside a blinded window.
I didn’t need my microphone. Inside the house, Jean’s voice was raised in anger: “I’m not going back to George—”
An older woman spoke in a more controlled voice: “You better take my advice and go back to him. George still cares about you and he was asking for you early this morning—but it won’t last forever.”
“Who cares?”
“You ought to care. If you lose him you won’t have anybody, and you don’t know how that feels until you’ve tried it. Don’t think you’re coming back to live with me.”
“I wouldn’t stay if you begged me on your knees.”
“That won’t happen,” the older woman said dryly. “I’ve got just enough room and enough money and enough energy left for myself.”
“You’re a cold woman, Mother.”
“Am I? I wasn’t always. You and your father made me that way.”
“You’re jealous!” Jean’s voice had changed. A hiss of pleasure underlay her anger and distress. “Jealous of your own daughter and your own husband. It all comes clear. No wonder you gave him Rita Shepherd.”
“I didn’t give him Rita. She threw herself at his head.”
“With a good strong assist from you, Mother. You probably planned the whole thing.”
The older woman said: “I suggest you leave here before you say any more. You’re nearly forty years old and you’re not my responsibility. You’re lucky to have a husband willing and able to look after you.”
“I can’t stand him,” Jean said. “Let me stay here with you. I’m scared.”
“So am I,” her mother said. “I’m afraid for you. You’ve been drinking again, haven’t you?”
“I did a little celebrating.”
“What have you got to celebrate?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know, Mother?” Jean paused. “I’ll tell you if you ask me pretty please.”
“If you have something to tell me, then tell me. Don’t fool around.”
“Now I’m not going to tell you.” Jean sounded like a child playing a teasing game. “You can find out for yourself.”
“There’s nothing to find out,” her mother said.
“Is that a fact? What would you say if I told you that Daddy’s alive?”
“Really alive?”
“You bet he is,” Jean said.
“Have you seen him?”
“I soon will. I’ve picked up his trail.”
“Where?”
“That’s my little secret, Mother.”
“Augh, you’ve
been imagining things again. I’d be crazy to believe you.”
Jean made no answer that I could hear. I suspected the two women had exhausted the conversation and each other. I moved from the shadow of the carport into the dim street.
Jean came out onto the lighted porch. The door was slammed behind her. The light went out. I waited for her beside her car.
She backed away from me, stumbling on the broken sidewalk. “What do you want?”
“Give me the gold box, Jean. It isn’t yours.”
“Yes it is. It’s an old family heirloom.”
“Come off it.”
“It’s true,” she said. “The box belonged to my Grandmother Rawlinson. She said it would come down to me. And now it has.”
I half believed her. “Could we talk a little in your car?”
“That never does any good. The more you talk the more it hurts.”
Her face was mournful and her body dragged. She gave off a peculiar feeling, that she was a ghost or cloudy emanation of the actual Jean Trask; her sense of herself was a vacuum, a cold emptiness.
“What’s hurting, Jean?”
“My whole life.” She spread both hands on her breasts as if the pain was overflowing her fingers. “Daddy ran off to Mexico with Rita. He didn’t even send me a birthday card.”
“How old were you?”
“Sixteen. I never had any fun after that.”
“Is your father alive?”
“I think he is. Nick Chalmers said he saw him in Pacific Point.”
“Where in Pacific Point?”
“Down by the railroad yards. That was a long time ago, when Nick was just a child. But he identified Daddy by his picture.”
“How did Nick get into this?”
“He’s my witness that Daddy is alive.” Her voice rose in pitch and amplitude, as if she was speaking to the woman in the house instead of me: “Why shouldn’t he be alive? He’d only be—let’s see, I’m thirty-nine and Daddy was twenty-four when I was born. That makes him sixty-three, doesn’t it?”
“Thirty-nine and twenty-four makes sixty-three.”
“And sixty-three isn’t old, especially not nowadays. He was always very youthful for his age. He could dive and dance and spin like a top,” she said. “He bounced me on his knee.”
It sounded like something repeated from her childhood. Her mind was being carried down the stream of memory, swept willy-nilly through subterranean passages toward roaring falls.
“I’m going to find my Daddy,” she said. “I’ll find him dead or alive. If he’s alive I’ll cook and keep house for him. And I’ll be happier than I ever was in my born days. If he’s dead I’ll find his grave and do you know what I’ll do then? I’ll crawl in with him and go to sleep.”
She unlocked her car and drove away, turning south onto the boulevard. Perhaps I should have followed her, but I didn’t.
chapter 12
I knocked on the front door of the stucco cottage. After an interval, the porch light came on over my head. Then the door was opened about four inches on a chain.
A woman with fading blond hair peered at me through the opening. Her face was set grimly, as if she’d expected to see her daughter again. The atmosphere around her was still charged.
“What is it?”
“I’ve just been talking to your father,” I said. “About a Colt revolver he bought in 1941.”
“I don’t know anything about a revolver.”
“Aren’t you Mrs. Eldon Swain?”
“Louise Rawlinson Swain,” she corrected me. But then she asked: “Has something come up about my husband?”
“Possibly. Could we talk inside? I’m a private detective.”
I handed her my photostat through the crack. She looked it over carefully, and did everything but bite it. Finally she handed it back.
“Who are you working for, Mr. Archer?”
“A lawyer in Pacific Point named John Truttwell. I’m looking into a couple of related crimes—a theft and a murder.” I didn’t bother adding that her daughter was connected with one of the crimes, possibly both.
She let me in. Her front room was poor and small. As in Rawlinson’s house, there were relics of better days. On the mantel over the gas fire a Dresden shepherd and shepherdess exchanged adoring glances.
A small Oriental rug lay not on the floor, which was covered with worn matting, but over the back of the chesterfield. Facing the chesterfield was a television set with an electric clock on top of it, and beside it a telephone table with a drawer. Everything was clean and well-dusted, but the room had a musty taint, as if neither it nor the woman in it had been fully used.
Mrs. Swain didn’t invite me to sit down. She stood facing me, a large woman like her daughter, with the same kind of heavy good looks.
“Who was murdered?”
“I’ll come to that, Mrs. Swain. I wanted to ask you first about a box that was stolen. It’s a Florentine gold box with classical figures on the lid, a man and a woman.”
“My mother had a box like that,” she said. “She used it as a jewel case. I never did know where it disappeared to after Mother died.” But her eyes were alive with roving speculation. “What is this all about? Has Eldon been heard from?”
“I don’t know.”
“You said ‘possibly.’ ”
“I didn’t want to rule anything out. I really came here to talk about the revolver your father gave you. But we’ll talk about anything you like.”
“There’s nothing I want to discuss.” But after a moment she asked me: “What did Father say?”
“Simply that he gave you the Colt for protection, after your husband left you. The year he mentioned was 1945.”
“All that is perfectly true,” she said carefully. “Did he mention the circumstances in which Eldon left?”
I threw her a slow curve. “Mrs. Shepherd wouldn’t let him.”
It jarred her. “Was Mrs. Shepherd present at the conversation?”
“She was in and out of the dining room.”
“She would be. What else did my father say in front of her?”
“I don’t remember if this was said in front of Mrs. Shepherd. But he told me that your house was burglarized in 1954 and the Colt was taken.”
“I see.” She looked around the room as if to see how the story fitted into it.
“Did it happen in this house?” I asked her.
She nodded.
“Was the burglar ever caught?”
“I don’t know. I don’t believe so.”
“Did you report the burglary to the police?”
“I don’t remember.” She wasn’t a good liar, and she screwed up her mouth in a kind of self-disgust. “Why is it important?”
“I’m trying to trace possession of the revolver. If you have any idea who the burglar was, Mrs. Swain—” I left the sentence unfinished, and glanced at the electric clock. It was half past eight. “About twenty hours ago, that revolver may have been used to kill a man. A man named Sidney Harrow.”
She knew the name. Her whole face caught and held it. The delicate skin around her eyes puckered in distress. After a moment she spoke.
“Jean didn’t tell me. No wonder she was frightened.” Mrs. Swain wrung her hands and walked away from me as far as the room would let her. “Do you suspect Eldon of killing Sidney Harrow?”
“Possibly. Was it your husband who took the gun in 1954?”
“Yes, it was.” She spoke with her head down and her face averted, like a woman in a storm. “I didn’t want to tell Father that Eldon had come back, or that I had seen him. So I made up a lie about a burglary.”
“Why did you have to tell your father anything?”
“Because he asked me for the gun the very next morning. I believe he’d heard that Eldon had been in town, and he intended to shoot him with the gun. But Eldon already had it. That’s quite an irony, isn’t it?”
It wasn’t the kind I could live on, but I agreed. “How did Eldon get hold of the
revolver? You didn’t give it to him?”
“No. I wouldn’t do that. I kept it at the back of the telephone drawer.” Her eyes moved past me to the telephone table. “I got it out when Eldon tapped on the door. I suspected it was Eldon, his knock was so distinctive. Shave and a haircut, two-bits, you know? That was Eldon’s speed. He was capable of coming back after spending nine years in Mexico with another girl. After all the other dreadful things he did to me and my family. And expect to smile it all away and charm us as he used to in the old days.”
She looked at the door. “I didn’t have the chain on the door at that time—I had it put on the following day. The door wasn’t locked, and Eldon came in smiling, calling my name. I wanted to shoot him, but I couldn’t pull the trigger of the gun. He walked right up and took it away from me.”
Mrs. Swain sat down as if her strength had been taken away. She leaned back against the Oriental rug. I sat down beside her tentatively.
“What happened then?”
“Just what you’d expect of Eldon. He denied everything. He hadn’t taken the money. He hadn’t gone to Mexico with the girl. He ran away because he’d been falsely accused, and had been living in strictest celibacy. He even argued that my family owed him something, because father publicly called him an embezzler and blackened his reputation.”
“What was your husband supposed to have done?”
“There’s no supposition about it. He was the cashier of my father’s bank, and he embezzled over half a million dollars. You mean Father didn’t tell you?”
“No, he didn’t. When did all this happen?”
“July the first, 1945—the blackest day of my life. He ruined my father’s bank and sold me into slavery.”
“I don’t quite follow, Mrs. Swain.”
“Don’t you?” She tapped her knee with her fist like a judge gaveling for order. “In the spring of 1945 I lived in a big house in San Marino. Before the summer was over, I had to move in here. Jean and I could have gone to live with Father on Locust Street, but I wouldn’t live in the same house with Mrs. Shepherd. That meant I had to get out and find a job. The only thing I ever learned to do well is sew. For over twenty years now I’ve been demonstrating sewing machines. That’s what I mean by slavery.” Her fist clenched on her knee. “Eldon robbed me of all the good things of life, and then tried to deny it to my face.”
The Goodbye Look Page 7