“No.”
“I don’t want to be caught in the middle between you.”
“If you don’t want that,” I said, “you better go and find a better place to hide.”
She looked up at me slantwise. I caught a glint of her naked self, shy and mercurial and afraid of being hurt. “Did you mean that? You want me to get lost?”
I took hold of her and answered her without words. After a minute, she broke away.
“I’m ready to go home now. Are you?”
I said I was, but I wasn’t quite. My feeling about Smitheram, anger deepened now by suspicion, got in the way of my feeling for his wife. And it started me thinking along less pleasant lines: the possibility that I might use her to get back at him, or get at him. I pushed these thoughts away but they crouched like unwanted children in the shadows, waiting for the lights to be turned out.
We headed north on the highway. Moira noticed my preoccupation. “If you’re tired I can drive.”
“It’s not that kind of tired.” I tapped my skull. “I have a few problems to work through, and my computer is a fairly early pre-binary model. It doesn’t say yes and no. It says mainly maybe.”
“About me?”
“About everything.”
We rode in silence past San Onofre. The great sphere of the atomic reactor loomed in the darkness like a dead and fallen moon. The actual moon hung in the sky above it.
“Is this computer of yours programmed for questions?”
“Some questions. Others put it completely out of whack.”
“Okay.” Moira’s voice became soft and serious. “I think I know what’s on you mind, Lew. You gave it away when you said five minutes with Nick could clear up everything.”
“Not everything. A lot.”
“You think he killed all three of them, don’t you? Harrow and poor Mrs. Trask and the man in the railroad yards?”
“Maybe.”
“Tell me what you really think.”
“What I really think is maybe. I’m reasonably sure he killed the man in the railroad yards. I’m not sure about the others, and I’m getting less sure all the time. Right now I’m going on the assumption that Nick was framed for the others and may know who framed him. Which means he may be next.”
“Is that why you didn’t want to come with me?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“I felt it, though. Look, if you feel you have to turn around and go back there, I’ll understand.” She added: “I can always leave my body to medical science. Or put in an application for equal time.”
I laughed.
“It’s not so funny,” Moira said. “Things keep happening, and the world keeps moving so fast, it’s hard for a woman to compete.”
“Anyway,” I said, “there’s no point in going back. Nick is well guarded. He can’t get out, and nobody can get in.”
“Which takes care of both your maybes, doesn’t it?”
We were silent for a long time. I would have liked to question her at length, about both Nick and her husband. But if I started to use the woman and the occasion, I’d be using a part of myself and my life that I tried to keep unused: the part that made the difference between me and a computer, or a spy.
The unasked questions simmered down after a while, and my mind hung loose in silence. The sense of living inside the case, which I sometimes used as a drug to keep me going, slowly left me.
The woman beside me had sensitive antennae. As if I’d withdrawn a protective shield, she moved in close to me. I drove with her warmth all down my right side and spreading through my body.
She lived on the Montevista shore in a rectilinear cliff-top house made of steel and glass and money.
“Put your car in the carport if you like. You will come in for a drink?”
“A short one.”
She couldn’t unlock the front door.
“You’re using your car key,” I told her.
She paused to consider. “I wonder what that means?”
“That you probably need glasses.”
“I do use glasses for reading.”
She let me in and turned on a light in the hall. We went down some steps into an octagonal room which was mostly window. I could see the moon almost close enough to touch, and, far below, the scrawled white lines of the breakers.
“It’s a nice place.”
“Do you think so?” She seemed surprised. “God knows the place was beautiful before we built on it, and when we were planning it with the architect. But the house never seemed to capture it.” She went on after a moment: “Building a house is like putting a bird in a cage. The bird being yourself, I guess.”
“Is that what they tell you at the clinic?” She turned to me with a quick smile. “Am I being terribly talky?”
“You did mention a drink.”
She leaned toward me, silver-faced, dark-eyed, and dark-mouthed in the thin light from outside. “What will you have?”
“Scotch.” Then her eyes moved and I caught that naked glint of her again, like a light hidden deep in a building. I said: “May I change my mind?”
She was willing to be taken. We shed our clothes, more or less, and lay down like wrestlers going to the mat under special rules, where pinning and being pinned were equally lucky and meritorious.
She said at one point, between falls, that I was a gentle lover.
“There are some advantages in getting older.”
“It isn’t that. You remind me of Sonny, and he was only twenty. You make me feel like Eve in the garden again.”
“That’s pretty fancy talk.”
“I don’t care.” She rose on one elbow, and her silver breast lay heavy on me. “Does it upset you when I mention Sonny?”
“Oddly enough, it doesn’t.”
“It shouldn’t, either. He was a poor little nothing boy. But we were happy together. We lived like silly angels doing things for each other. He’d never been with a girl before, and I’d only been with Ralph.”
Her voice changed on her husband’s name, and my feeling also changed. “Ralph was always so terribly technical and self-assured. He came on in bed like an army pacifying an undeveloped country. But with Sonny it was different. He was so gentle and nutty. Love was like a game, a fantasy that we lived in, playing house together. Sometimes he pretended to be Ralph. Sometimes I pretended to be his mother. Does that sound sick?” she said with a nervous little laugh. “Ask Ralph.”
“I’m boring you, aren’t I?”
“On the contrary. How long did this affair go on?”
“Nearly two years.”
“Then Ralph came home?”
“Eventually he did. But I’d already broken with Sonny. The fantasy was running out of control and so was he. Besides, I couldn’t just leap from his bed into Ralph’s. As it was the guilt nearly killed me.”
I looked down along her body. “You don’t strike me as the guilt-ridden type.”
She answered after a moment. “You’re right. It wasn’t guilt. It was simple pain. I’d given up my one true love. For what? A hundred-thousand-dollar house and a four-hundred-thousand-dollar clinic. In neither of which I’d be caught dead if I could help it. I’d rather be back in one room at the Magnolia.”
“It isn’t there any more,” I said. “Aren’t you building up the past a little large?”
She answered thoughtfully. “Maybe I am exaggerating, especially the good parts. Women do tend to make up stories featuring ourselves.”
“I’m glad men never do.”
She laughed. “I bet Eve made up the story of the apple.”
“And Adam made up the story of the garden.” She crawled close against me. “You’re a nut. That’s a diagnosis. I’m glad I told you all this. Are you?”
“I can stand it. Why did you?”
“Various reasons. Also you have the advantage of not being my husband.”
“That’s the finest thing any woman ever said to me.”
“I mean it seriousl
y. If I told Ralph what I’ve told you, it would be the end of me as a person. I’d become just another of his famous psychiatric trophies. He’d probably have me stuffed and hang me up on the office wall with his diplomas.” She added: “In a way that’s what he has done.”
There were questions I wanted to ask her about her husband but the time and place were wrong, and I was still determined not to use them. “Forget about Ralph. Whatever happened to Sonny?”
“He found another girl and married her.”
“And you’re jealous?”
“No. I’m lonely. I have no one.”
We merged our lonelinesses once again, in something less than love but sweeter than self. I didn’t get home to West Los Angeles after all.
chapter 25
In the morning I left early without waking Moira. Fog had moved in from the sea, blanketing the cliff-top house and the whole Montevista shore. I drove up the road very slowly between lines of phantom trees. I came to the end of the fog suddenly. The sky was cloudless except for a couple of smeared jet contrails. I drove downtown and checked in at the police station.
Lackland was in his office. The electric clock on the wall above his head said that it was exactly eight o’clock. It bothered me for a minute. It made me feel as if Lackland had brought me in again at this particular time by the exertion of some occult force.
“Glad you dropped by,” he said. “Sit down. I was wondering where everybody was.”
“I went to San Diego on a lead.”
“And you took your clients with you?”
“Their son had an accident. They went to San Diego to look after him.”
“I see.” He waited for a while, twisting and biting his lips as if to punish his mouth for asking questions. “What kind of an accident did he have, or is it a family secret?”
“Barbiturate, mainly. He also has a head injury.”
“Was it a suicide attempt?”
“Could be.”
Lackland leaned forward abruptly, pushing his face toward mine. “After he knocked off Mrs. Trask?”
I wasn’t ready for the question, and I avoided answering it directly. “The prime suspect in the Trask killing is Randy Shepherd.”
“I know that,” Lackland said, making it clear that I hadn’t given him anything. “We have an APB on Shepherd from San Diego.”
“Does it mention that Shepherd knew Eldon Swain from ’way back?”
Lackland gnawed at his upper lip. “Do you know that for a fact?”
“Yes. I talked to Shepherd yesterday, before he was regarded as a suspect. He told me that Swain ran off with his daughter Rita and half a million dollars. Apparently Shepherd has spent his life trying to latch onto a piece of that money. It’s fairly clear, by the way, that Shepherd talked Mrs. Trask into hiring Sidney Harrow and coming here to the Point. He was using them as cat’s-paws to find out what he could without the risk of coming here himself.”
“So Shepherd had a motive to kill Swain after all.” Lackland’s voice was low, as if his fifteen years on the case had used up all his energy at last. “And he had a motive to burn off Swain’s fingerprints. Where did you talk to him?”
“On the Mexican border near Imperial Beach. He wouldn’t be there any more.”
“No. As a matter of fact, Shepherd was seen in Hemet last night. He stopped for gas, heading north in a stolen car, a late-model Merc convertible, black.”
“Better check Pasadena. Shepherd came from there, and so did Eldon Swain.”
I filled Lackland in on the Pasadena end of the case, on Swain and Mrs. Swain and their murdered daughter, and Swain’s embezzlement from Rawlinson’s bank. “Once you know these facts,” I concluded, “you can’t seriously go on blaming Nick Chalmers for everything. He wasn’t even born when Eldon Swain took the money from the bank. But that was the real beginning of the case.”
Lackland was silent for a while. His face in repose was like an eroded landscape in a dry season. “I know some history, too. Rawlinson, the man who owned the bank, used to spend his summers here back in the twenties and thirties. I could tell you more.”
“Please do.”
Lackland produced one of his rare smiles. It wasn’t very different from his mouth-gnawings, except that a shy light flickered in his eyes. “I hate to disappoint you, Archer. But no matter how far back you go, Nick Chalmers is in the picture. Sam Rawlinson had a girl friend here in town, and after her husband died they spent their summers together. You want to know who his girl friend was?”
“Nick’s grandmother,” I said. “Judge Chalmers’s widow.”
Lackland was disappointed. He lifted a typed sheet from his in-basket, read it carefully, crushed it up in a ball, and threw it at a trash can in the corner of the office. It missed. I scooped it up and dropped it in.
“How did you find that out?” he asked me finally.
“I’ve been doing some digging in Pasadena, as I told you. But I still don’t see how Nick comes into this. He’s not responsible for his grandmother.”
For once Lackland failed to offer an argument. But I thought as I left the police station that perhaps the reverse was true, and Nick’s dead grandmother was responsible for him. Certainly there had to be a meaning in the old connection between the Rawlinson family and the Chalmers family.
I passed the courthouse on my way downtown. In a cast stone bas-relief above the entrance, a big old Justice with bandaged eyes fumbled at her scales. She needed a seeing-eye man, I told her silently. I was feeling dangerously good.
After a breakfast of steak and eggs I went into a barbershop and had a shave. By this time it was close to ten o’clock, and Truttwell should be in his office.
He wasn’t, though. The receptionist told me that he had just left and hadn’t said when he’d be back. She was wearing a black wig this morning, and took my troubled stare as a compliment.
“I like to change my personality. I get sick of having the same old personality.”
“Me, too.” I made a face at her. “Did Mr. Truttwell go home?”
“I don’t know. He received a couple of long-distance calls and then he just took off. If he goes on this way, he’ll end up losing his practice.” The girl smiled intensely up at me, as if she was already looking for a new opening. “Do you think black hair goes well with my complexion? Actually I’m a natural brownette. But I like to keep experimenting with myself.”
“You look fine.”
“I thought so, too,” she said, overconfidently.
“Where did the distance calls come from?”
“The one call came from San Diego—that was Mrs. Chalmers. I don’t know who the other one was, she wouldn’t give her name. It sounded like an older woman.”
“Calling from where?”
“She didn’t say, and it was dialed direct.”
I asked her to call Truttwell’s house for me. He was there, but he wouldn’t or couldn’t come to the phone. I talked to Betty instead.
“Is your father all right?”
“I guess he is. I hope so.” The young woman’s voice was serious and subdued. “Are you?”
“Yes.” But she sounded doubtful.
“If I come right over, will he be willing to talk to me?”
“I don’t know. You’d better hurry. He’s going out of town.”
“Where out of town?”
“I don’t know,” she repeated glumly. “If you do miss him, Mr. Archer, I’d still like to talk to you myself.”
Truttwell’s Cadillac was standing in front of his house when I got there. Betty opened the front door for me. Her eyes were rather dull and unresponsive. Even her bright hair looked a little tarnished.
“Have you seen Nick?” she said.
“I’ve seen him. The doctor gave him a fairly good report.”
“But what did Nick say?”
“He wasn’t talkable.”
“He’d talk to me. I wanted so badly to go to San Diego.”
She raised her fists and pres
sed them against her breast. “Father wouldn’t let me.”
“Why not?”
“He’s jealous of Nick. I know that’s a disloyal thing to say. But Father made it very clear. He said when Mrs. Chalmers dismissed him this morning that I would have to choose between him and Nick.”
“Why did Mrs. Chalmers dismiss him?”
“You’ll have to ask Father. He and I are not communicating.”
Truttwell appeared in the hallway behind her. Though he must have heard what she’d just said, he made no reference to it. But he gave her a hard impatient look that I saw and she didn’t.
“What’s this, Betty? We don’t keep visitors standing in the doorway.”
She turned away without speaking, moving into another room and shutting the door behind her. Truttwell spoke in a complaining way, with a thin note of malice running through his complaint:
“She’s losing her mind over that sad sack. She wouldn’t listen to me. Maybe she will now. But come in, Archer. I have news for you.”
Truttwell took me into his study. He was even more carefully dressed and groomed than usual. He wore a fresh sharkskin suit, a button-down shirt with matching silk tie and handkerchief, and the odors of bay rum and masculine scent.
“Betty tells me you’re parting company with the Chalmerses. You look as if you’re celebrating.”
“Betty shouldn’t have told you. She’s losing all sense of discretion.”
His handsome pink face was fretful. He pressed and patted his white hair. Betty had hurt him in his vanity, I thought, and apparently he didn’t have much else to fall back on.
I was more disturbed by the change in Truttwell than by the change in his daughter. She was young, and would change again before she settled on a final self.
“She’s a good girl,” I said.
Truttwell closed the study door and stood against it. “Don’t sell her to me. I know what she is. She let that creep get to her and poison her mind against me.”
“I don’t think so.”
“You’re not her father,” he said, as if paternity conferred the gift of second sight. “She’s put herself down on his level. She’s even using the same crude Freudian jargon.” His face was red now and his voice was choked. “She actually accused me of taking an unhealthy interest in her.”
The Goodbye Look Page 14