She had no answer this time. She moved to a chair near the inner door and sat down inexactly and abruptly. I followed and stood over her.
“What happened to the money?”
She twisted sideways away from me. “Which money do you mean?”
“The money Eldon Swain embezzled from the bank.”
“He took it across the Mexican border with him. I stayed behind in Dago. He said he’d send for me but he never did. So I married Larry Chalmers. That’s the whole story.”
“What did Eldon do with the money in Mexico?”
“I heard he lost it. He ran into a couple of bandits in Baja and they took it off him and that was that.”
“What were the bandits’ names, Rita?”
“How should I know? It was just a rumor I heard.”
“I’ll tell you a better rumor. The bandits’ names were Larry and Rita, and they didn’t steal the money in Mexico. Eldon Swain never got it across the border. You set him up for a highjacking, and fingered him for Larry. And the two bandits lived happily ever after. Until now.”
“You’ll never prove that! You can’t!”
She was almost shouting, as if she hoped to drown out the sound of my voice and the rumors of the past. Truttwell opened the inner door.
“What’s going on?” He gave me a stern look. “What are you trying to prove?”
“We were discussing what happened to Swain’s half million. Mrs. Chalmers claims that Mexican bandits got it. But I’m fairly certain she and Chalmers highjacked it from Swain. It must have happened a day or two after Swain embezzled the money and brought it to San Diego, where she was waiting for him.”
Mrs. Chalmers glanced up, as if my freewheeling reconstruction had touched on a factual detail. Truttwell noticed the giveaway movement of her eyes. His whole face opened and closed like a grasping hand.
“They stole a car,” I went on, “and brought the money here to Pacific Point, to his mother’s house. This was July 3, 1945, Larry and Rita staged a burglary in reverse. It wasn’t hard, since Larry’s mother was blind and Larry must have had keys to the house, as well as the combination of the safe. They put the money in the safe and left it.”
Mrs. Chalmers got to her feet and went to Truttwell and took hold of his arm. “Don’t believe him. I wasn’t within fifty miles of here that night.”
“Was Larry?” Truttwell said.
“Yes! It was all Larry’s doing. His mother never used the safe after she lost her sight and he figured it was a perfect place to stash—I mean—”
Truttwell took her by the shoulders with both hands and held her at arm’s length.
“You were here with Larry that night. Weren’t you?”
“He forced me to come along. He held a gun on me.”
“That means you were driving,” Truttwell said. “You killed my wife.”
The woman hung her head. “It was Larry’s fault. She recognized him, see. He twisted the wheel and stomped on my foot and speeded up the car. I couldn’t stop it. It went right over her. He wouldn’t let me stop till we got back to Dago.”
Truttwell shook her. “I don’t want to hear that. Where is your husband now?”
“At home. I already told you he isn’t feeling well. He’s just sitting around in a daze.”
“He’s still dangerous,” I said to Truttwell. “Don’t you think we better call Lackland?”
“Not until I’ve had a chance to talk to Chalmers. You come along with me, eh? You too, Mrs. Chalmers.”
Once again she sat between us in the front seat of Truttwell’s car. She peered far ahead along the freeway like an accident-prone subject living in dread of still further disasters.
“The other morning,” I said, “when Nick took all those sleeping pills and tranquilizers, where were you?”
“In bed asleep. I took a couple of chloral hydrates myself the night before.”
“Was your husband in bed asleep?”
“I wouldn’t know. We have separate rooms.”
“When did he take off to look for Nick?”
“Right after you left that morning.”
“Driving the Rolls?”
“That’s right.”
“Where did he go?”
“All over the place, I guess. When he gets excited he runs around like a maniac. Then he sits around like a dummy for a week.”
“He went to San Diego, Mrs. Chalmers. And there’s evidence that Nick rode along with him, lying unconscious under a rug in the back seat.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“I’m afraid it did to your husband. When Nick climbed out the bathroom window, your husband intercepted him in the garden. He knocked him out with a spade or some other tool and hid him in the Rolls until he was ready to leave for San Diego.”
“Why would he do a thing like that to his own son?”
“Nick wasn’t his son. He was Eldon Swain’s son, and your husband knew it. You’re forgetting your own life history, Mrs. Chalmers.”
She gave me a quick sideways look. “Yeah, I wish I could.”
“Nick knew or suspected whose son he was,” I said. “In any case, he was trying to get at the truth about Eldon Swain’s death. And he was getting closer all the time.”
“Nick shot Eldon himself.”
“We all know that now. But Nick didn’t drag the dead man into the fire to burn off his fingerprints. That took adult strength, and adult motives. Nick didn’t keep Swain’s gun, to use it on Sidney Harrow fifteen years later. Nick didn’t kill Jean Trask, though your husband did his best to frame him for it. That was why he took Nick to San Diego.”
The woman said in a kind of awe: “Did Larry kill all those people?”
“I’m afraid he did.”
“But why?”
“They knew too much about him. He was a sick man protecting his fantasy.”
“Fantasy?”
“The pretend world he lived in.”
“Yeah, I see what you mean.”
We left the freeway at Pacific Street and drove up the long slope. Behind us at the foot of the town the low red sun was glaring on the water. In the queer, late light the Chalmers mansion looked insubstantial and dreamlike, a castle in Spain referring to a past that had never existed.
The front door was unlocked, and we went in. Mrs. Chalmers called her husband—“Larry!”—and got no answer.
Emilio appeared laggingly in the corridor that led to the back of the house. Mrs. Chalmers rushed toward him.
“Where is he?”
“I don’t know, ma’am. He ordered me to stay in the kitchen.”
“Did you tell him I searched the Rolls?” I said.
Emilio’s black eyes slid away from mine. He didn’t answer me.
The woman had climbed the short flight of stairs to the study. She pounded with her fist on the carved oak door, sucked her bleeding knuckles, and pounded again.
“He’s in there!” she cried. “You’ve got to get him out. He’ll do away with himself.”
I pushed her to one side and tried the door. It was locked. The room beyond it was terribly still.
Emilio went back to the kitchen for a screwdriver and a hammer. He used them to unhinge the door of the study.
Chalmers was sitting in the judge’s swivel chair, his head inclined rather oddly to one side. He had on a blue naval uniform with a full commander’s three gold stripes. Blood from his cut throat had run down over his row of battle ribbons, making them all one color. An old straight razor lay open beside his dangling hand.
His wife stood back from his body as if it gave off mortal laser rays.
“I knew he was going to do it. He wanted to do it the day they came to the front door.”
“Who came to the front door?” I said.
“Jean Trask and that muscle boy she traveled with. Sidney Harrow. I slammed the door in their faces, but I knew they’d be coming back. So did Larry. He got out Eldon’s gun that he’d kept in the safe all those years. What he had
in mind was a suicide pact. He wanted to shoot me and then himself. Dr. Smitheram and I talked him into a trip to Palm Springs instead.”
“You should have let him shoot himself,” Truttwell said.
“And me too? Not on your life. I wasn’t ready to die. I’m still not ready.”
She still had passion, if only for herself. Truttwell and I were silent. She said to him:
“Look, are you still my lawyer? You said you were.”
He shook his head. His eyes seemed to be looking through and beyond her, into a sad past or a cold future.
“You can’t go back on me now,” she said. “You think I haven’t suffered enough? I’m sorry about your wife. I still wake up in the middle of the night and see her in the road, poor woman, laying there like a bundle of old clothes.”
Truttwell struck her face with the back of his hand. A little blood spilled from her mouth, drawing a line across her chin like a crack in marble.
I stepped between them so that he couldn’t hit her again. It wasn’t the sort of thing that Truttwell should be doing.
She took some courage from my gesture. “You don’t have to hurt me, John. I feel bad enough without that. My whole time here, it’s been like living in a haunted house. I mean it. The very first night we came, when we were here in the study, putting the packages of money in the safe—Larry’s blind old mother came down in the dark. She said: ‘Is that you, Sonny?’ I don’t know how she knew who it was. It was creepy.”
“What happened then?” I said.
“He took her back to her room and talked to her. He wouldn’t tell me what he said to her, but she didn’t bother us after that.”
“Estelle never mentioned it,” Truttwell said to me. “She died without mentioning it to anyone.”
“Now we know what she died of,” I said. “She found out what had become of her son.”
As though he had overheard me, the dead man seemed to have cocked his head in an attitude of stiff embarrassment. His widow moved toward him like a sleepwalker and stood beside him. She touched his hair.
I stayed with her while Truttwell phoned the police.
ROSS MACDONALD
Ross Macdonald’s real name was Kenneth Millar. Born near San Francisco in 1915 and raised in Ontario, Millar returned to the United States as a young man and published his first novel in 1944. He served as the president of the Mystery Writers of America and was awarded their Grand Master Award as well as the Mystery Writers of Great Britain’s Gold Dagger Award. He died in 1983.
Books by Ross Macdonald
Blue City
The Dark Tunnel
Trouble Follows Me
The Three Roads
The Moving Target
The Drowning Pool
The Way Some People Die
The Ivory Grin
Meet Me at the Morgue
Find a Victim
The Name is Archer
The Barbarous Coast
The Doomsters
The Galton Case
The Ferguson Affair
The Wycherly Woman
The Zebra-Striped Hearse
The Chill
Black Money
The Far Side of the Dollar
The Goodbye Look
The Underground Man
Sleeping Beauty
The Blue Hammer
BOOKS BY ROSS MACDONALD
THE BARBAROUS COAST
The beautiful, high-diving blonde had Hollywood dreams and stars in her eyes but now she seems to have disappeared without a trace. Hired by her hotheaded husband and her rummy “uncle,” Lew Archer sniffs around Malibu and finds the stink of blackmail, blood money, and murder on every pricey silk shirt. Beset by dirty cops, a bumptious boxer turned silver-screen pretty boy, and a Hollywood mogul with a dark past, Archer discovers the secret of a grisly murder that just won’t stay hidden.
Crime Fiction/978-0-307-27903-3
THE IVORY GRIN
A hard-faced woman clad in a blue mink stole and dripping with diamonds hires Lew Archer to track down her former maid, who she claims has stolen her jewelry. Archer can tell he’s being fed a line, but curiosity gets the better of him and he accepts the case. He tracks the wayward maid to a ramshackle motel in a seedy, rundown small town, but finds her dead in her tiny room, with her throat slit ear to ear. Archer digs deeper into the case and discovers a web of deceit and intrigue, with crazed number-runners from Detroit, gorgeous triple-crossing molls, and a golden-boy shipping heir who’s mysteriously gone missing.
Crime Fiction/978-0-307-27899-9
SLEEPING BEAUTY
Lew finds himself the confidant of a wealthy, violent family with a load of trouble on their hands—including an oil spill, a missing girl, a lethal dose of Nembutal, a six-figure ransom, and a stranger afloat, face down, off a private beach. Here is Ross Macdonald’s masterful tale of buried memories, the consequences of arrogance, and the anguished relations between parents and their children.
Crime Fiction/978-0-375-70866-4
THE DOOMSTERS
Hired by Carl Hallman, the desperate-eyed junkie scion of an obscenely wealthy political dynasty, detective Lew Archer investigates the suspicious deaths of Hallman’s parents, Senator Hallman and his wife, Alicia. Arriving in the sleepy town of Purissima, Archer discovers that orange groves may be where the Hallmans made their mint but they’ve been investing heavily in political intimidation and police brutality to shore up their rancid riches. However, after years of dastardly double-crossing and low down dirty dealing, the family seems to be on the receiving end of a karmic death blow. With two already dead and another consigned to the nuthouse, Archer races to crack the secret before another Hallman lands on the slab.
Crime Fiction/978-0-307-27904-0
THE WAY SOME PEOPLE DIE
In a rundown house in Santa Monica, Mrs. Samuel Lawrence presses fifty crumpled bills into Lew Archer’s hand and asks him to find her wandering daughter, Galatea. Described as ‘crazy for men’ and without discrimination, she was last seen driving off with small-time gangster Joe Tarantine, a hophead hood with a rep for violence. Archer traces the hidden trail from San Francisco slum alleys to the luxury of Palm Springs, traveling through an urban wilderness of drugs and viciousness. As the bodies begin to pile up, he finds that even angel faces can mask the blackest of hearts.
Crime Fiction/978-0-307-27898-2
THE GOODBYE LOOK
Lew is hired to investigate a burglary at the mission-style mansion mansion of Irene and Larry Chalmers. The prime suspect, their son Nick, has a talent for disappearing, and the Chalmerses are a family with money and memories to burn. As Archer zeros in on Nick, he discovers a troubled blonde, a stash of wartime letters, a mysterious hobo. Then a stiff turns up in a car on an empty beach. And Nick turns up with a Colt .45.
Crime Fiction/978-0-375-70865-7
THE INSTANT ENEMY
At first glance, it’s an open-and-shut missing persons case: a headstrong daughter has run off to be with her hothead juvenile delinquent boyfriend. That is until this bush-league Bonnie and Clyde kidnap Stephen Hackett, a local millionaire industrialist. Now, Archer is offered a cool 100 Gs for his safe return by Hachett’s coquettish heiress mother who has her own mysterious ties to this disturbed duo. But the deeper Archer digs, the more he realizes that nothing is as it seems and everything is questionable. Is the boyfriend a psycho ex-con with murder on the brain or a damaged youngster trying to straighten out his twisted family tree? And is the daughter simply his nympho sex-kitten companion in crime or really a fragile kid, trying to block out horrific memories of bad acid and an unspeakable sex crime.
Crime Fiction/978-0-307-27905-7
ALSO AVAILABLE:
Black Money, 978-0-679-76810-4
The Blue Hammer, 978-0-679-76810-4
The Chill, 978-0-679-76807-4
The Drowning Pool, 978-0-679-76806-7
The Far Side of the Dollar, 978-0-679-76865-4
Find a Victim, 978-0-375-7
0867-1
The Galton Case, 978-0-679-76864-7
The Wycherly Woman, 978-0-375-70144-3
The Moving Target, 978-0-375-70146-7
The Underground Man, 978-0-679-76808-1
The Zebra-Striped Hearse, 978-0-375-70145-0
VINTAGE CRIME/BLACK LIZARD
Available at your local bookstore, or visit
www.randomhouse.com
The Goodbye Look Page 22