“I won’t spoil things, Mrs. Smitheram.”
“My name is Moira.”
She was born in Chicago, she told me at dinner, and trained as a psychiatric social worker in the University of Michigan Hospital. There she met and married Ralph Smitheram, who was completing his residency in psychiatry. When he joined the Navy and was assigned to the San Diego Naval Hospital, she came along to California.
“We lived in a little old hotel here in La Jolla. It was sort of rundown but I loved it. After we finish dinner I want to go and see if it’s still there.”
“We can do that.”
“I’m taking a chance, coming back here. I mean, you can’t imagine how beautiful it was. It was my first experience of the ocean. When we went down to the cove in the early morning, I felt like Eve in the garden. Everything was fresh and new and spare. Not like this at all.”
With a movement of her hand she dismissed her present surroundings: the thick pseudo-Hawaiian decor, the uniformed black waiters, the piped-in music, all the things that went with the fifteen-dollar Chateaubriand for two.
“This part of the town has changed,” I agreed.
“Do you remember La Jolla in the forties?”
“Also the thirties. I lived in Long Beach then. We used to come down for the surf here and at San Onofre.”
“Does ‘we’ refer to you and your wife?”
“Me and my buddies,” I said. “My wife wasn’t interested in surf.”
“Past tense?”
“Historical. She divorced me back in those same forties. I don’t blame her. She wanted a settled life, and a husband she could count on to be there.”
Moira received my ancient news in silence. After a while she spoke half to herself: “I wish I’d gotten a divorce then.” Her eyes came up to mine. “What did you want, Archer?”
“This.”
“Do you mean being here with me?” I thought she was overeager for a compliment, then realized she was kidding me a little. “I hardly justify a lifetime of effort.”
“The life is its own reward,” I countered. “I like to move into people’s lives and then move out again. Living with one set of people in one place used to bore me.”
“That isn’t your real motivation. I know your type. You have a secret passion for justice. Why don’t you admit it?”
“I have a secret passion for mercy,” I said. “But justice is what keeps happening to people.”
She leaned toward me with that female malice which carries some sexual heat. “You know what’s going to happen to you? You’ll grow old and run out of yourself. Will that be justice?”
“I’ll die first. That will be mercy.”
“You’re terribly immature, do you know that?”
“Terribly.”
“Don’t I make you angry?”
“Real hostility does. But you’re not being hostile. On the contrary. You’re off on the usual nurse kick, telling me I better marry again before I get too old, or I won’t have anybody to nurse me in my old age.”
“You!” She spoke with angry force, which changed into laughter.
After dinner we left my car where it was in the restaurant parking lot, and walked down the main street toward the water. The surf was high and I could hear it roaring and retreating like a sea lion frightened by the sound of his own voice.
We turned right at the top of the last slope and walked past a brand-new multistoried office building, toward a motel which stood on the next corner. Moira stood still and looked it over.
“I thought this was the corner, but it isn’t. I don’t remember that motel at all.” Then she realized what had happened. “This is the corner, isn’t it? They tore down the old hotel and put up the motel in its place.” Her voice was full of emotion, as if a part of her past had been demolished with the old building.
“Wasn’t it called the Magnolia Hotel?”
“That’s right. The Magnolia. Did you ever stay there?”
“No,” I said. “But it seems to have meant quite a lot to you.”
“It did and does. I lived on there for two years after Ralph shipped out. I think now it was the realest part of my life I’ve never told anyone about it.”
“Not even your husband?”
“Certainly not Ralph.” Her voice was sharp. “When you try to tell Ralph something, he doesn’t hear it. He hears your motive for saying it, or what he thinks is your motive. He hears some of the implications. But he doesn’t really hear the obvious meaning. It’s an occupational hazard of psychiatrists.”
“You’re angry with your husband.”
“Now you’re doing it!” But she went on: “I’m deeply angry with him, and with myself. It’s been growing on me for quite a while.”
She had begun to walk, drawing me across the lighted corner and away from it downhill toward the sea. Spray hung in luminous clouds around the scattered lights. The green common and the waterfront path were virtually deserted. She began to talk again as we walked along the path.
“At first I was angry with myself for doing what I did. I was only nineteen when it started, and full of normal adolescent guilt. Later I was angry with myself for not following through.”
“You’re not making yourself entirely clear.”
She had raised the collar of her coat against the spray. Now she looked at me over it like a desperado wearing a partial face mask: “I don’t intend to, either.”
“I think you want to, though.”
“What’s the use? It’s all gone—completely past and gone.”
Her voice was desolate. She walked quickly away from me, and I followed her. She was in an uncertain mood, a middle-aging woman groping for a line of continuity in her life. The path was dark and narrow, and it would be easy by accident or design to fall among the rocks in the boiling surf.
I caught up with her at the cove, the physical center of the past she had been talking about. The broken white water streamed up the slope of the beach. She took her shoes off and led me down the steps. We stood just above the reach of the water.
“Come and get me,” she said to it or me or someone else. “Were you in love with a man who died in the war?”
“He wasn’t a man. He was just a boy who worked in the post office.”
“Was he the one who came down here with you, when you felt like Eve in the garden?”
“He was the one. I still feel guilty about it. I lived here on the beach with another boy while Ralph was overseas defending his country.” Her voice flattened sardonically whenever she spoke of her husband. “Ralph used to write me long dutiful letters, but somehow they made no difference. I actually wanted to undercut him, he was so superconfident and know-it-all. Do you think I’m slightly crazy?”
“No.”
“Sonny was, you know. More than slightly.”
“Sonny?”
“The boy I lived with in the Magnolia. Actually he’d been one of Ralph’s patients, which is how I got to know him in the first place. Ralph suggested that I keep an eye on him. There’s an irony for you.”
“Stop it, Moira. I think you’re reaching for trouble.”
“Some reach for it,” she said. “Others have it thrust upon them. If I could just go back to that time and change a few things—”
“What would you change?”
“I’m not quite sure.” She sounded rather dreary. “Let’s not talk about it any more now.”
She walked away from me. Her naked feet left wasp-waisted impressions in the sand. I admired the grace of her departing movements, but she came back toward me ciumsily. She was walking backward, trying to fit her feet again into the prints she had made and not succeeding.
She walked into me and turned, her furred breast against my arm. I put my arm around her and held her. There were tears on her face, or spray. Anyway, it tasted salt.
chapter 21
The main street was quiet and bright when we walked back to the car. The stars were all in order, and quite near. I don’t rem
ember seeing any other people until I went into the restaurant to phone George Trask.
He answered right away, in a moist, overused voice: “This is the Trask residence.”
I said I was a detective and would like to talk to him about his wife.
“My wife is dead.”
“I’m sorry. May I come over and ask you a few questions?”
“I guess so.” He sounded like a man who had no use for time.
Moira was waiting for me in the car, like a silver-blue cat in a cave.
“Do you want to be dropped at the hospital? I have an errand to do.”
“Take me along.”
“It’s a fairly unpleasant errand.”
“I don’t care.”
“You would if you lost your marriage and ended up with me. I spend a lot of my nights doing this kind of thing.”
Her hand pressed my knee. “I know that I could be hurt. I’ve already made myself vulnerable. But I’m sick of always doing the professional thing for prudential reasons.”
I took her along to Bayview Avenue. The police car was gone. The black Volkswagen with the crumpled fender was still in George Trask’s driveway. I remembered now where I had seen it before; under Mrs. Swain’s rusty carport in Pasadena.
I knocked on the front door and George Trask let us in. His gangling body was carefully dressed in a dark suit and black tie. He had an air of having made himself the servant of the situation, like a mortician. His grief showed only in his reddened eyes, and in the fact that he didn’t remember me.
“This is Mrs. Smitheram, Mr. Trask. She’s a psychiatric social worker.”
“It’s nice of you to come,” he said to her. “But I don’t need that kind of help. Everything’s under control. Come into the living room and sit down, won’t you? I’d offer to make you some coffee but I’m not allowed to go into the kitchen. And anyway,” he went on, as if his voice was being piped in from someplace beyond his control, “the coffeemaker got broken this morning when my wife was murdered.”
“I’m sorry,” Moira said.
We followed George Trask into the living room and sat down beside each other, facing him. The window drapes were partly open, and I could see the lights of the city wavering on the water. The beauty of the scene and the woman beside me made me more aware of the pain George Trask was suffering, like solitary confinement in the world.
“The company is being very understanding,” he said conversationally. “They’re giving me a leave of absence, openended, with full pay. That will give me a chance to get everything squared away, eh?”
“Do you know who murdered your wife?”
“We have a pretty good suspect—man with a criminal record as long as your arm—he’s known Jean all her life. The police asked me not to mention his name.”
It had to be Randy Shepherd. “Has he been picked up?”
“They expect to get him tonight. I hope they do, and when they do, put him in the gas chamber. You know and I know why crime and murder are rampant. The courts won’t convict and when they do convict they won’t mete out the death penalty. And even when they do the law is flouted right and left. Convicted murderers walk free, they don’t gas anybody any more, no wonder we have a breakdown of law and order.” His eyes were wide and staring, as if they were seeing a vision of chaos.
Moira rose and touched his head. “Don’t talk so much, Mr. Trask. It makes you upset.”
“I know. I’ve been talking all day.”
He put his large hands on his glaring face. I could see his eyes bright as coins between his fingers. His voice went on unmuffled, as if it were independent of his will:
“The dirty old son deserves to be gassed, even if he didn’t kill her he’s directly responsible for her death. He got her started on this latest mania of looking for her father. He came here to the house last week with his schemes and stories, told her he knew where her father was and she could be with him again. And that’s what happened,” he added brokenly. “Her father’s dead in his grave and Jean is with him.”
Trask began to cry. Moira quieted him with small noises more than words.
I noticed after a while that Louise Swain was standing in the hall doorway looking like her daughter’s ruined ghost. I got up and went to her:
“How are you, Mrs. Swain?”
“Not very well.” She drew a hand across her forehead. “Poor Jean and I could never get along—she was her father’s daughter—but we cared about each other. Now I have no one left.” She shook her head slowly from side to side. “Jean should have listened to me. I knew she was getting into deep water again, and I tried to stop her.”
“What kind of deep water do you mean?”
“All kinds. It wasn’t good for her to go wandering off into the past, imagining that her father was alive. And it wasn’t safe. Eldon was a criminal and he consorted with criminals. One of them killed her because she found out too much.”
“Do you know this, Mrs. Swain?”
“I know it in my bones. There are hundreds of thousands of dollars at stake, remember. For that kind of money anyone would murder anyone else.” Her eyes seemed to be squinting against a bright light. “A man would even murder his own daughter.”
I maneuvered her into the hallway, out of hearing of the living room. “Could your husband still be alive, in your opinion?”
“He could be. Jean thought so. There has to be a reason for everything that’s happened. I’ve heard of men changing their faces with plastic surgery so they could come and go.” Her narrowed gaze swung to my face and stayed on it, as if she was looking for surgical scars that would mark me as Eldon Swain.
And other men, I was thinking, had disappeared and left in their places dead men who resembled them. I said to the woman:
“About fifteen years ago, at the time your husband came back from Mexico, a man was shot dead in Pacific Point. He’s been identified as your husband. But the identification has to be tentative: it’s based on pictures which aren’t the best in the world. One of them is the photograph you gave me last night.”
She looked at me in bewilderment. “Was that only last night?”
“Yes. I know how you feel. You mentioned last night that your daughter had all your best family pictures. You also mentioned some home movies. They could be useful in this investigation.” I see.
“Are they here in this house?”
“Some of them are, anyway. I’ve just been going through them.” She spread her fingers. “It’s how I got the dust on my fingers.”
“May I have a look at the pictures, Mrs. Swain?”
“That depends.”
“On what?”
“Money. Why should I give you anything free?”
“It may be evidence in your daughter’s murder.”
“I don’t care,” she cried. “Those pictures are the only things I have left—all I have to show for my life. Whoever gets them has to pay for them, the way I’ve had to pay for things. And you can go and tell Mr. Truttwell that.”
“How did he get into this?”
“You’re working for Truttwell, aren’t you? I asked my father about him, and he says Truttwell can well afford to pay me!”
“How much are you asking?”
“Let him make a bid,” she said. “Incidentally, I found the gold box you were inquiring about—my mother’s Florentine box.”
“Where was it?”
“That’s none of your business. The point is that I have it and it’s for sale as well.”
“Was it really your mother’s?”
“It certainly was. I’ve found out what happened to it after her death. My father gave it to another woman. He didn’t want to admit it when I asked him about it last night. But I forced it out of him.”
“Was the other woman Estelle Chalmers?”
“You know about his liaison with her, eh? I guess everyone knows. He had his gall giving her Mother’s jewel box. It was supposed to go to Jean, you know.”
“What ma
kes it so important, Mrs. Swain?”
She thought for a moment. “I guess it stands for everything that has happened to my family. Our whole life went to pieces. Other people ended up with our money and our furniture and even our little objects of art.” She added after another thinking moment: “I remember when Jean was just a small child, my mother used to let her play with the box. She told her the story of Pandora’s box—you know?—and Jean and her friends pretended that was what it was. When you lifted the lid you released all the troubles of the world.” The image seemed to frighten her into silence.
“May I see the box and the pictures?”
“No you don’t! This is my last chance to get a little capital together. Without capital you’re nobody, you don’t exist. You’re not going to cheat me out of my last chance.”
She seemed to be full of anger, but it was probably sorrow she was feeling. She’d stepped on a rotten place and fallen through the floor and knew she was trapped in poverty forever. The dream she was defending wasn’t a dream for the future. It was a dreaming memory of the past, when she had lived in San Marino with a successful husband and a forty-foot pool.
I told her I would discuss the matter with Truttwell, and advised her to take good care of the box and the pictures. Then Moira and I said good night to George Trask, and went out to my car.
“Poor people.”
“You were a help.”
“I wish I could have been.” Moira paused. “I know that certain questions are out of bounds. But I’m going to ask one anyway. You don’t have to answer.”
“Go ahead.”
“When you found Nick today, was he in this neighborhood?”
I hesitated, but not for long. She was married to another man, and in a profession with different rules from mine. I gave her a flat no.
“Why?”
“Mr. Trask told me his wife was involved with Nick. He didn’t know Nick’s name, but his description was accurate. Apparently he saw them together in Pacific Point.”
“They spent some time together,” I said shortly.
“Were they lovers?”
“I have no reason to think so. The Trasks and Nick make a very unlikely triangle.”
The Goodbye Look Page 12