He shook his head. “I don’t recall. The whole thing is a blank. I don’t even remember going to San Diego.”
Dr. Smitheram came forward again. “I have to call a halt now. I’m not going to let you undo what we’ve done for Nick in the last couple of days.”
“Let’s finish it off,” Truttwell said. “After all, it’s been dragging on now for most of Nick’s young life.”
“I want to finish it, too,” Nick said, “if I can.”
“And so do I.” It was Moira coming out of a long silence.
The doctor turned on her coldly. “I don’t remember asking for your opinion.”
“You have it, anyway. Let’s get it over with.”
Moira’s voice had overtones of weary guilt. The two of them confronted each other for a moment as if they were the only ones in the room.
I said to Nick: “When did you start remembering in San Diego?”
“When I woke up in the hospital that night. I was missing the whole day.”
“And what was the last you remembered before that?”
“When I got up that morning. I’d been awake all night, with one thing and another, and I was feeling awfully depressed. That horrible scene in the railroad yards kept coming back. I could smell the fire and the whisky.
“I decided to turn off my mind with a sleeping pill or two, and I got up and went into the bathroom where they kept them. When I saw the red and yellow capsules in the bottles I changed my mind. I decided to take a lot of them and turn off my mind for good.”
“Was that when you wrote your suicide note?”
He considered my question. “I wrote it just before I took the pills. Yes.”
“How many did you take?”
“I didn’t count them. A couple of handfuls, I guess, enough to kill me. But I couldn’t just sit in the bathroom and wait. I was afraid they’d find me and not let me die. I climbed out the bathroom window and dropped to the ground. I must have fallen and hit my head on something.” He balanced the letters on his knee and touched the side of his head tenderly. “Next thing I knew I was in the San Diego hospital. I’ve already told Dr. Smitheram all this.”
I glanced at Smitheram. He wasn’t listening. He was talking in intense, low tones to his wife.
“Dr. Smitheram?”
He turned abruptly, but not in response to me. He reached for the letters in Nick’s lap. “Let’s have a look at these, eh?”
Smitheram riffled through the flimsy pages and began to read aloud to his wife: “ ‘There’s something about pilots that reminds you of racehorses—developed almost to an unhealthy point. I hope I’m not that way to other eyes.
“ ‘Commander Wilson is, though. (He’s no longer censoring mail so I can say this.) He’s been in for over four years now, but he seems to be exactly the same gentlemanly Yale man he was when he came in. He has, however, a certain air of arrested development. He has given his best to the war—’ ”
Truttwell said dryly: “You read beautifully, doctor, but this is hardly the occasion.”
Smitheram acted as if he hadn’t heard Truttwell. He said to his wife: “What was the name of my squadron leader on the Sorrel Bay?”
“Wilson,” she said in a small voice.
“Do you remember I made this comment about him in a letter I wrote you in March 1945?”
“Vaguely. I’ll take your word for it.”
Smitheram wasn’t satisfied. He went through the pages again, his furious fingers almost tearing them. “Listen to this, Moira: ‘We’re very near the equator and the heat is pretty bad, though I don’t mean to complain. If we’re still anchored at this atoll tomorrow I’m going to try to get off the ship for a swim, which I haven’t had since we left Pearl months ago. One of my big daily pleasures, though, is the shower I take every night before going to bed.’ And so on. Later, the letter mentions that Wilson was shot down over Okinawa. Now I distinctly remember writing this to you in the summer of 1945. How do you account for that, Moira?”
“I don’t,” she said with her eyes down. “I won’t attempt to account for it.”
Truttwell stood up and looked past Smitheram’s shoulder at the letter. “I take it this isn’t your writing. No, I see it’s not.” He added after a pause: “It’s Lawrence Chalmers’ writing, isn’t it?” And after a further pause: “Does this mean his war letters to his mother were all a fake?”
“They certainly were.” Smitheram shook the documents in his fist. His eyes were on his wife’s downcast face. “I still don’t understand how these letters got written.”
“Was Chalmers ever a Navy pilot?” Truttwell said.
“No. He did make an attempt to get into the pilot training program. But he was hopelessly unqualified. In fact, he was given a general discharge by the Navy a few months after he enlisted.”
“Why was he discharged?” I said.
“For reasons of mental health. He broke down in boot camp. It happened to quite a few schizoid boys when they tried to assume a military role. Particularly those whose mothers were the dominant parent, as in Larry’s case.”
“How do you know so much about his case, doctor?”
“I was assigned to it, in the Navy Hospital in San Diego. Before we turned him loose on the world, we gave him a few weeks of treatment. He’s been my patient ever since—except for my two years’ sea duty.”
“Was he the reason you settled here in the Point?”
“One of the reasons. He was grateful to me and he offered to help set me up in practice. His mother had died and left him a good deal of money.”
“One thing I don’t understand,” Truttwell said, “is how he could fool us with these phony letters. He must have had to fake Fleet Post Office envelopes and markings. And how could he receive answers if he wasn’t in the Navy?”
“He had a job in the Post Office,” Smitheram said. “I got him that job myself before I shipped out. I suppose he set up a special box for his own mail.” As if his head was being wrenched around by an external force, Smitheram looked at his wife again. “What I don’t understand, Moira, is how he got a chance—repeated chances—to copy my letters to you.”
“He must have taken them,” she said.
“Did you know he was taking them?”
She nodded glumly. “Actually, he borrowed them to read, or so he said. But I can understand why he copied them. He hero-worshipped you. He wanted to be like you.”
“How did he feel about you?”
“He was fond of me. He made no secret of it, even before you left.”
“After I left, did you see him regularly?”
“I could hardly help it. He lived next door.”
“Next door in the Magnolia Hotel? You mean you lived in adjoining rooms?”
“You asked me to keep an eye on him,” she said.
“I didn’t tell you to live with him. Did you live with him?” He was speaking in the hectoring voice of a man who was hurting himself and knew it but kept on doing it.
“I lived with him,” his wife said. “I’m not ashamed of it. He needed someone. I may have had just as much to do with saving his mind as you had.”
“So it was therapy, was it? That’s why you wanted to come here after the war. That’s why he’s—”
She cut him short: “You’re off the track, Ralph. You usually are where I’m concerned. I quit with him before you ever came home.”
Irene Chalmers lifted her head. “That’s true. He married me in July—”
Truttwell leaned toward her and touched her mouth with his finger. “Don’t volunteer any information, Irene.”
She lapsed into silence, and I could hear Moira’s intense low voice.
“You knew about my relationship with him,” she was saying to her husband. “You can’t treat a patient for twenty-five years without knowing that much about him. But you chose to act as if you hadn’t known.”
“If I did,” he said—“I’m not admitting anything but if I did, I was acting in my patient’s
interest, not my own.”
“You really believe that, don’t you, Ralph?”
“It’s true.”
“You’re fooling yourself. But you’re not fooling anyone else. You knew Larry Chalmers was a fake, just as I did. We conspired with his fantasy and went on taking his money.”
“I’m afraid you’re fantasying, Moira.”
“You know I’m not.”
He looked around at our faces to see if we were judging him. His wife brushed past him and left the room. I followed her down the corridor.
chapter 36
I caught Moira at the locked door beside the suicide room. For the second time in our acquaintance she was having trouble unlocking a door. I mentioned this.
She turned on me with hard bright eyes. “We won’t talk about the other night. It’s all in the past—so long ago I hardly remember your name.”
“I thought we were friends.”
“So did I. But you broke that.”
She flung one arm out toward Nick’s room. The woman in the suicide room began to moan and cry.
Moira unlocked the door which let us out of the wing and took me to her office. The first thing she did there was to take her handbag out of a drawer and set it on top of the desk, ready to go.
“I’m leaving Ralph. And don’t say anything, please, about my going with you. You don’t like me well enough.”
“Do you always think people’s thoughts for them?”
“All right—I don’t like myself well enough.” She paused and looked around her office. The glowing paintings on the walls seemed to reflect her anger with herself, like subtle mirrors. “I don’t like making money from other people’s suffering. Do you know what I mean?”
“I ought to. It’s how I live.”
“But you don’t do it for the money, do you?”
“I try not to,” I said. “When your income passes a certain point you lose touch. All of a sudden the other people look like geeks or gooks, expendables.”
“That happened to Ralph. I won’t let it happen to me.” She sounded like a woman in flight, but more hopeful than afraid. “I’m going back to social work. It’s what I really love. I was never happier than when I lived in La Jolla in one room.”
“Next door to Sonny.”
“Yes.”
“Sonny was Lawrence Chalmers, of course.”
She nodded.
“And the other girl he took up with was Irene Chalmers?”
“Yes. She called herself Rita Shepherd in those days.”
“How do you know?”
“Sonny told me about her. He’d met her at a swimming party in San Marino a couple of years before. Then one day she walked into the post office where he worked. He was terribly upset by the meeting at first, and now I can understand why. He was afraid his secret would leak out, and his mother would learn he was just a postal clerk instead of a Navy pilot.”
“Did you know about the deception?”
“Naturally I knew he was living a fantasy life. He used to dress up in officers’ clothes and walk the streets at night. But I didn’t know about his mother—there were some things he didn’t talk about, even to me.”
“How much did he tell you about Rita Shepherd?”
“Enough. She was living with an older man who kept her stashed in Imperial Beach.”
“Eldon Swain.”
“Was that his name?” She added after a thinking pause: “It all comes together, doesn’t it? I didn’t realize how much life, and death, I was involved with. I guess we never do until afterwards. Anyway, Rita shifted to Sonny and I moved to the sidelines. By then I didn’t much care. It was pretty wearing, looking after Sonny, and I was willing to pass him on to the next girl.”
“What I don’t understand is how you could stay interested in him for over two years. Or why a woman like his wife would fall for him.”
“Women don’t always go for the solid virtues,” she said. “Sonny had a wild psychotic streak. He would try almost anything once.”
“I’ll have to cultivate my wild psychotic streak. But I must say Chalmers keeps his pretty well hidden.”
“He’s older now, and under tranquilizers all the time.”
“Tranquilizers like Nembu-Serpin?”
“I see you’ve been boning up.”
“Just how sick is he?”
“Without supportive therapy, and drugs, he’d probably have to be hospitalized. But with these things he manages to lead a fairly well-adjusted life.” She sounded like a salesman who didn’t quite believe in her product.
“Is he dangerous, Moira?”
“He could be dangerous, under certain circumstances.”
“If somebody found out that he was a fake, for example?”
“Perhaps.”
“You’re very perhapsy all of a sudden. He’s been your husband’s patient for twenty-five years, as you pointed out. You must know something about him.”
“We know a good deal. But the doctor-patient relationship involves a right to privacy.”
“Don’t lean too heavily on that. It doesn’t apply to a patient’s crimes, or potential crimes. I want to know if you and Dr. Smitheram considered him a threat to Nick.”
She sidestepped the question. “What kind of a threat?”
“A mortal threat,” I said. “You and your husband knew that he was dangerous to Nick, didn’t you?”
Moira didn’t answer me in words. She moved around her office and began to take the pictures down from the walls and pile them on the desk. In a token way she seemed to be trying to dismantle the clinic and her place in it.
A knock on the door interrupted her work. It was the young receptionist. “Miss Truttwell wants to speak to Mr. Archer. Shall I send her in?”
“I’ll go out,” I said.
The receptionist looked around in dismay at the empty walls. “What happened to all your pictures?”
“I’m moving out. You could help me.”
“I’ll be glad to, Mrs. Smitheram,” the young woman said brightly.
Betty was standing in the middle of the outer room. She looked windblown and excited.
“The lab said there was quite a lot of Nembutal in the sample. Also some chloral hydrate, but they couldn’t tell how much without further testing.”
“I’m not surprised.”
“What does it mean, Mr. Archer?”
“It means that Nick was in the back of the family Rolls some time after he took his overdose of pills. He vomited some of them up, and that may have saved his life.”
“How is he?”
“Doing quite well. I had a talk with him just now.”
“Can I see him?”
“That isn’t up to me. His mother, and your father, are with him right now.”
“I’ll wait.”
I waited with her, each of us thinking his own thoughts. I needed quiet. The case was coming together in my mind, constructing itself in inner space like a movie of a falling building reversed.
The inner door opened, and Irene Chalmers came through on Truttwell’s arm, leaning on him heavily, like a survivor. She had shifted her weight from Chalmers to Truttwell, I thought, as she had once shifted it from Eldon Swain to Chalmers.
Truttwell became aware of his daughter. His eyes moved nervously, but he didn’t try to disengage himself from Irene Chalmers. Betty gave them a so-that’s-how-it-is look.
“Hello, Dad. Hello, Mrs. Chalmers. I hear Nick is much better.”
“Yes, he is,” her father said.
“Can I talk with him for a minute?”
He hesitated for a thoughtful moment. His gaze flicked across my face, and back to his daughter’s. He answered her in a careful, gentle voice: “We’ll take it up with Dr. Smitheram.”
He led Betty through the inner door and closed it carefully behind them.
I was alone in the reception room with Irene Chalmers. As she knew. She looked at me with a kind of dull formality, in the hope that nothing real would be sai
d between us.
“I’d like to ask you a few questions, Mrs. Chalmers.”
“That doesn’t mean I have to answer them.”
“Once and for all, now, was Eldon Swain Nick’s father?”
She faced me in passive stubbornness. “Probably. Anyway he thought he was. But you can’t expect me to tell Nick he killed his own natural father—”
“He knows it now,” I said. “And you can’t go on using Nick to hide behind.”
“I don’t understand what you mean.”
“You suppressed the facts about Eldon Swain and his death for your own sake, not for Nick’s. You let him carry the burden of the guilt, and take the rap for you.”
“There isn’t any rap. We kept everything quiet.”
“And let Nick live in mental torment for fifteen years. It was a lousy trick to pull on your own son, or anybody’s son.”
She bowed her head as if in shame. But what she said was: “I’m not admitting anything.”
“You don’t have to. I’ve got enough physical evidence, and enough witnesses, to make a case against you. I’ve talked to your father and your mother, and Mr. Rawlinson, and Mrs. Swain. I’ve talked to Florence Williams.”
“Who in hell is she?”
“She owns Conchita’s Cabins, in Imperial Beach.”
Mrs. Chalmers raised her head and swept her fingers across her face, as if there was dust or cobwebs in her eyes. “I’m sorry I ever set foot in that dump, I can tell you. But you can’t make anything out of it, not at this late date. I was just a juvenile at the time. And anything I did away back then—the statute of limitations ran out on it long ago.”
“What did you do away back then?”
“I’m not going to testify against myself. I said before that I was taking the fifth.” She added in a stronger voice: “John Truttwell will be back in a minute, and this is his department. If you want to get rough, he can get rougher.”
I knew I was on uncertain ground. But this might be the only chance I would have to reach Mrs. Chalmers. And both her responses to my accusations, and her failures to respond, had tended to confirm my picture of her. I said:
“If John Truttwell knew what I know about you, he wouldn’t touch you with a sterilized stick.”
The Goodbye Look Page 21