“I wasn’t expecting to see you, Mr. Archer.” His tone was polite and neutral. “I understood my wife had severed diplomatic relations.”
“We’re still talking to each other, I hope. How is Nick doing?”
“Quite well.” He went on in a careful voice: “My wife and I have reason to be grateful for your help. I want you to know that. Unfortunately, you were caught in the middle, between Truttwell and Dr. Smitheram. They can’t cooperate, and under the circumstances we have to stay with Smitheram.”
“The doctor’s assuming a great deal of responsibility.”
“I suppose he is. But that’s not your affair.” Chalmers was getting a little edgy. “And I hope you didn’t come here to make an attack on Dr. Smitheram. In a situation like this, a man has to lean on someone. We’re not islands, you know,” he said surprisingly. “We can’t bear the weight of these problems all alone.”
His angry sorrow bothered me. “I agree with you, Mr. Chalmers. I’d still like to help if I can.”
He looked at me suspiciously. “In what way?”
“I’m getting the feeling of the case. I think it started before Nick was born, and that his part in it is fairly innocent. I can’t promise to get him off the hook entirely. But I hope to prove that he’s a victim, a patsy.”
“I’m not sure I understand you,” Chalmers said. “But come inside.”
He took me into the study where the case had begun. I felt slightly cramped and smothered, as if everything that had happened in the room was still going on, using up space and air. I was struck by the thought that Chalmers, with family history breathing down his neck, may have felt smothered and cramped most of the time.
“Will you have some sherry, old man?”
“No thanks.”
“Then neither will I.” He turned the swivel chair in front of the desk and sat facing me across the refectory table. “You were going to give me an overview of the situation, I think.”
“I’ll try, with your help, Mr. Chalmers.”
“How can I help? Events have gone quite beyond me.” He made a helpless gesture with his hands.
“With your forbearance, then. I’ve just been talking to Betty Truttwell about her mother’s death.”
“That was a tragic accident.”
“I think it may have been more than an accident. I understood Mrs. Truttwell was your mother’s closest friend.”
“She was indeed. Mrs. Truttwell was wonderfully kind to my mother in her last days. If I have any criticism at all, it has to do with her failure to tell me how bad things were with Mother. I was still overseas that summer, and I had no idea that Mother was close to death. You can imagine my feelings when my ship came back to the West Coast in mid-July, and I found that both of them were dead.” His troubled blue gaze came up to mine. “Now you tell me Mrs. Truttwell’s death may not have been an accident.”
“I’m raising the question, anyway. The question of accident versus murder isn’t crucial, really. When someone is killed in the course of a felony, it’s murder under the law, in any case. But I’m beginning to suspect Mrs. Truttwell was intentionally killed. She was your mother’s closest friend, she must have known all her secrets.”
“My mother had no secrets. The whole community looked up to her.”
Chalmers rose angrily, spinning the creaky swivel chair. He took up a stance with his back to me, which reminded me oddly of a stubborn boy. Facing him was the primitive picture that concealed the door of the safe: the sailing ship, the naked Indians, the Spanish soldiers marching in the sky.
“If the Truttwells have been maligning my mother,” he said, “I’ll sue them for slander.”
“Nothing like that happened, Mr. Chalmers. Nothing’s been said against your mother by anyone. I’m trying to get at who the people were that broke into the house in 1945.”
He turned. “They certainly wouldn’t have been known to my mother. Her friends were the best people in California.”
“I don’t doubt it. But your mother was probably known to the burglars, and they probably knew what was in the house that made it worth breaking into.”
“I can answer that,” Chalmers said. “My mother kept her money in the house. It was a habit she inherited from my father, along with the money itself. I repeatedly urged her to put it in the bank, but she wouldn’t.”
“Did the burglars get it?”
“No. The money was intact when I got home from overseas. But Mother was dead. And Mrs. Truttwell, too.”
“Was there very much money involved?”
“Quite a sum, yes. Several hundred thousand.”
“Where did it come from?”
“I told you: Mother inherited it from my father.” He gave me a pale suspicious look, as if I was planning to insult her again. “Are you suggesting the money wasn’t hers?”
“Certainly not. Couldn’t we forget her for a bit?”
“I can’t.” He added in a kind of gloomy pride: “I live with the thought of my mother constantly.”
I waited, and tried again: “What I’m trying to get at is this. Two burglaries or at least two thefts occurred in this house, in this very room, over twenty-three years apart. I think they were connected.”
“In what way?”
“Through the people involved.”
Chalmers’s eyes were puzzled. He sat down opposite me again. “I’m afraid you’ve lost me.”
“I’m simply trying to say that some of the same people, with the same motives, may have been involved in both these burglaries. We know who did the recent one. It was your son Nick, acting under pressure from a couple of other people, Jean Trask and Sidney Harrow.”
Chalmers leaned forward, resting his forehead on his hand. His bald spot gleamed, defenseless as a tonsure.
“Did he kill those people?”
“I doubt it, as you know, but I can’t prove he didn’t. Yet. Let’s stick to the burglaries for now. Nick took a gold box which had your letters in it.” I was being careful not to name his mother. “The letters were probably incidental. The gold box was the main thing: Mrs. Trask wanted it. Do you know why?”
“Presumably because she was a thief.”
“She didn’t think so, though. She was quite open about the box. Apparently, it had belonged to Mrs. Trask’s grandmother, and after her grandmother’s death it was given to your mother by her grandfather.”
Chalmers’s head sank lower. The fingers supporting it raked up through his hair. “You’re talking about Mr. Rawlinson, aren’t you?”
“I’m afraid I am.”
“This is infinitely depressing to me,” he said. “You’re twisting a harmless relationship between an elderly man and a mature woman—”
“Let’s forget about the relationship.”
“I can’t,” he said. “I can’t forget about it.” His head had sunk closer to the table, guarded by his hands and arms.
“I’m not judging anyone, Mr. Chalmers, certainly not your mother. The point is simply that there was a connection between her and Samuel Rawlinson. Rawlinson ran a bank, the Pasadena Occidental, and it was ruined by embezzlement around the time of the burglary. His son-in-law, Eldon Swain, was blamed for the embezzlement, perhaps correctly. But it’s been suggested to me that Mr. Rawlinson may have looted his own bank.”
Chalmers sat up rigidly. “Who suggested that, for heaven’s sake?”
“Another figure in the case—a convicted burglar named Randy Shepherd.”
“And you’d take the word of a man like that, and let him blacken my mother’s name?”
“Who said anything about your mother?”
“Aren’t you about to offer me the precious theory that my mother took stolen money from that whoremaster? Isn’t that what you have on your rotten mind?”
Hot wet rage had flooded his eyes. He stood up blinking and swung an open hand at my face. It was a feeble attempt. I caught his arm by the wrist and handed it back to him.
“I’m afraid we can’t talk
, Mr. Chalmers. I’m sorry.”
I went out to my car and turned downhill toward the freeway. Fog still lay in a grey drift across the foot of the town.
chapter 28
Inland in Pasadena the sun was hot. Children were playing in the road in front of Mrs. Swain’s house. Truttwell’s Cadillac, which stood at the curb, acted like a magnet on the children.
Truttwell was sitting in the front seat, engrossed in business papers. He glanced up impatiently at me.
“You took your time about getting here.”
“Something came up. Also, I can’t afford a Cadillac.”
“I can’t afford to waste hours waiting for people. The woman said she’d be here at twelve.”
It was twelve thirty by my wristwatch. “Is Mrs. Swain driving from San Diego?”
“I presume so. I’ll give her until one o’clock to get here.”
“Maybe her car broke down, it’s pretty old. I hope nothing’s happened to her.”
“I’m sure nothing has.”
“I wish I could be sure. The leading suspect in her daughter’s death was seen in Hemet last night. Apparently, he was heading this way in a stolen car.”
“Who are you talking about?”
“Randy Shepherd. He’s the ex-con who used to work for Mrs. Swain and her husband.”
Truttwell didn’t seem much interested. He turned to his papers, and rattled them at me. From what I could see of them, they were Xeroxed copies of the articles of incorporation of something called the Smitheram Foundation.
I asked Truttwell what it was. He didn’t answer me, or even look up. Irritated by his bad manners, I went and got the envelope of letters out of the trunk of my car.
“Have I mentioned,” I said in a casual voice, “that I recovered the letters?”
“Chalmers’s letters? You know very well you haven’t. Where did you get hold of them?”
“They were in Nick’s apartment.”
“I’m not surprised,” he said. “Let’s have a look at them.”
I slid into the front seat beside him and handed him the envelope. He opened it and peered at its contents:
“God, but this brings back the past. Estelle Chalmers lived for these letters, you know. The early ones were nothing much, as I recall. But Larry’s epistolary style improved with practice.”
“You’ve read them?”
“Some of them. Estelle gave me no choice. She was so proud of her young hero.” His tone was just faintly ironic. “Toward the end, when her sight failed completely, she asked us—my wife and me—to read them aloud to her as they came. We tried to persuade her to hire a nurse-companion, but she refused. Estelle had a very strong sense of privacy, and it got stronger as she got older. The main burden of looking after her fell on my wife.” He added in quiet regret: “I shouldn’t have let it happen to my young wife.”
He fell into a silence, which I finally broke: “What was the matter with Mrs. Chalmers?”
“I believe she had glaucoma.”
“She didn’t die of glaucoma.”
“No. I think she died of grief—grief for my wife. She gave up eating, she gave up everything. I took the liberty of calling a doctor, very much against her wishes. She lay in bed with her face to the wall and wouldn’t let the doctor examine her, or even look at her. And she wouldn’t let me try to get Larry home from overseas.”
“Why not?”
“She claimed to be perfectly well, though obviously she wasn’t. She wanted to die alone and unseen, I think. Estelle had been a real beauty, and some of it lasted almost to the end. Also, as she grew older, she became a bit of a miser. You’d be surprised how many older women do. The idea of having a doctor come to the house, or hiring a nurse, seemed like a horrible extravagance to Estelle. Her poor-mouthing actually had me convinced. But of course she’d been quite wealthy all along.
“I’ll never forget the day following her funeral. Larry was finally en route home after the usual snafu, and in fact he arrived a couple of days later. But the County Administrator didn’t want to wait to check the house and its contents. As a member of the courthouse crowd he’d known Estelle all his life, I think he knew or suspected that she kept her money in the house, as Judge Chalmers had before her. And of course there had been the attempted burglary. If I had been in full possession of my faculties, I’d have checked the safe the morning after the break-in. But I had troubles of my own.”
“You mean your wife’s death?”
“The loss of my wife was the main disaster, of course. It left me with full responsibility for an infant girl.” He looked at me with painful candor. “A responsibility I haven’t handled too well.”
“The point is that it’s over. Betty’s grown up. She has to make her own choices.”
“But I can’t let her marry Nick Chalmers.”
“She will if you keep saying that.”
Truttwell went into another of his silences. He seemed to be catching up at last with great stretches of lost time. When his eyes changed back to present time, I said:
“Do you have any idea who killed your wife?”
He shook his white head. “The police failed to come up with a single suspect.”
“What was the date of her death?”
“July 3, 1945.”
“Exactly how did it happen?”
“I’m afraid I don’t really know. Estelle Chalmers was the only surviving witness, and she was blind and saw nothing. Apparently my wife noticed something wrong at the Chalmers house and went over there to investigate. The thieves chased her out into the road and ran her down with their car. Actually it wasn’t their car—it had been stolen. The police recovered it in the tules below San Diego. There were—physical evidences on the bumper that proved it had been used to murder my wife. The murderers probably escaped over the border.”
Truttwell’s forehead was shining with sweat. He wiped it with a silk handkerchief.
“I’m afraid I can’t tell you anything more about the events of that night. I was in Los Angeles on business. I got home in the small hours and found my wife in the morgue and my little girl being cared for by a policewoman.”
His voice broke, and for once I saw through Truttwell’s surface into his hidden self. He lived with a grief so central and consuming that it drained the energy from his external life, and made him seem a smaller man than he was, or had once been.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Truttwell. I had to ask you these questions.”
“I don’t quite see their relevance.”
“Neither do I, yet. When I interrupted you, you were telling me about the County Administrator checking the house.”
“So I was. As the representative of the Chalmers family I opened the house for him. I also turned over the combination of the safe, which Estelle had given me some time before. It turned out to be stuffed with money, of course.”
“How much?”
“I don’t recall the exact figure. Certainly it was up in the hundreds of thousands. It took the Administrator most of the day to count it, even though some of the notes were in large denominations, up to ten thousand.”
“Where did it all come from, do you know?”
“Her husband probably left her some of it. But Estelle was widowed when she was still quite young, and it’s not exactly a secret that there were other men in her life. One or two of them were very successful men. I suppose they gave her money, or told her how to make it.”
“And how to avoid taxes on it?”
Truttwell shifted uneasily in the car seat. “It hardly seems necessary to raise that question. All this is far away and long ago.”
“It seems here and now to me.”
“If you must know,” he said impatiently, “the tax issue is dead. I persuaded the government to settle for inheritance taxes on the full amount. They had no way of proving the source of the money.”
“The source is what interests me. I understand the Pasadena banker Rawlinson was one of the men in Mrs. Chalmers’s life.
”
“He was, for many years. But that was a long time before her death.”
“Not so very,” I said. “In one of these letters, written in the fall of 1943, Larry asked to be remembered to him. Which means that his mother was still seeing Rawlinson.”
“Really? How did Larry feel about Rawlinson?”
“The letter was noncommittal.”
I could have given Truttwell a fuller answer, but I had decided to suppress my interview with Chalmers, at least for the present. I knew that Truttwell wouldn’t approve of it.
“What are you getting at, Archer? You’re not suggesting that Rawlinson was the source of Mrs. Chalmers’s money?”
As if he had pushed a significant button which closed a circuit, the phone began to ring in Mrs. Swain’s front room. It rang ten times, and stopped.
“It was your idea,” I said.
“But I was speaking generally about the men in Estelle’s life. I didn’t single out Samuel Rawlinson. As you perfectly well know, he was ruined by the embezzlement.”
“His bank was.”
Truttwell’s face twisted in surprise. “You can’t mean he embezzled the money himself.”
“The idea has come up.”
“Seriously?”
“I hardly know. I got it from Randy Shepherd. It originated with Eldon Swain. Which doesn’t help to make it true.”
“I should think not. We know that Swain ran off with the money.”
“We know that he ran off. But the truth isn’t always so obvious; in fact, it’s usually just as complex as the people who make it. Consider the possibility that Swain took some of the bank’s money and Rawlinson caught him at it and took a great deal more. He used Mrs. Chalmers’s safe to cache the money, but she died before he could recover it.”
Truttwell gave me a look of appalled interest. “You have a tortuous imagination, Archer.” But he added: “What was the date of the embezzlement?”
I consulted my black notebook. “July 1, 1945.”
“That was just a couple of weeks before Estelle Chalmers died. It rules out the possibility you suggest.”
“Does it? Rawlinson didn’t know she was going to die. They may have been planning to use the money, go someplace and live together.”
The Goodbye Look Page 16