The Goodbye Look

chapter 12

I knocked on the front door of the stucco cottage. After an interval, the porch light came on over my head. Then the door was opened about four inches on a chain.

A woman with fading blond hair peered at me through the opening. Her face was set grimly, as if she’d expected to see her daughter again. The atmosphere around her was still charged.

“What is it?”

“I’ve just been talking to your father,” I said. “About a Colt revolver he bought in 1941.”

“I don’t know anything about a revolver.”

“Aren’t you Mrs. Eldon Swain?”

“Louise Rawlinson Swain,” she corrected me. But then she asked: “Has something come up about my husband?”

“Possibly. Could we talk inside? I’m a private detective.”

I handed her my photostat through the crack. She looked it over carefully, and did everything but bite it. Finally she handed it back.

“Who are you working for, Mr. Archer?”

“A lawyer in Pacific Point named John Truttwell. I’m looking into a couple of related crimes – a theft and a murder.” I didn’t bother adding that her daughter was connected with one of the crimes, possibly both.

She let me in. Her front room was poor and small. As in Rawlinson’s house, there were relics of better days. On the mantel over the gas fire a Dresden shepherd and shepherdess exchanged adoring glances.

A small Oriental rug lay not on the floor, which was covered with worn matting, but over the back of the chesterfield. Facing the chesterfield was a television set with an electric clock on top of it, and beside it a telephone table with a drawer. Everything was clean and well-dusted, but the room had a musty taint, as if neither it nor the woman in it had been fully used.

Mrs. Swain didn’t invite me to sit down. She stood facing me, a large woman like her daughter, with the same kind of heavy good looks.

“Who was murdered?”

“I’ll come to that, Mrs. Swain. I wanted to ask you first about a box that was stolen. It’s a Florentine gold box with classical figures on the lid, a man and a woman.”

“My mother had a box like that,” she said. “She used it as a jewel case. I never did know where it disappeared to after Mother died.” But her eyes were alive with roving speculation. “What is this all about? Has Eldon been heard from?”

“I don’t know.”

“You said ‘possibly.’ ”

“I didn’t want to rule anything out. I really came here to talk about the revolver your father gave you. But we’ll talk about anything you like.”

“There’s nothing I want to discuss.” But after a moment she asked me: “What did Father say?”

“Simply that he gave you the Colt for protection, after your husband left you. The year he mentioned was 1945.”

“All that is perfectly true,” she said carefully. “Did he mention the circumstances in which Eldon left?”

I threw her a slow curve. “Mrs. Shepherd wouldn’t let him.”

It jarred her. “Was Mrs. Shepherd present at the conversation?”

“She was in and out of the dining room.”

“She would be. What else did my father say in front of her?”

“I don’t remember if this was said in front of Mrs. Shepherd. But he told me that your house was burglarized in 1954 and the Colt was taken.”

“I see.” She looked around the room as if to see how the story fitted into it.

“Did it happen in this house?” I asked her.

She nodded.

“Was the burglar ever caught?”

“I don’t know. I don’t believe so.”

“Did you report the burglary to the police?”

“I don’t remember.” She wasn’t a good liar, and she screwed up her mouth in a kind of self-disgust. “Why is it important?”

“I’m trying to trace possession of the revolver. If you have any idea who the burglar was, Mrs. Swain–” I left the sentence unfinished, and glanced at the electric clock. It was half past eight. “About twenty hours ago, that revolver may have been used to kill a man. A man named Sidney Harrow.”

She knew the name. Her whole face caught and held it. The delicate skin around her eyes puckered in distress. After a moment she spoke.

“Jean didn’t tell me. No wonder she was frightened.” Mrs. Swain wrung her hands and walked away from me as far as the room would let her. “Do you suspect Eldon of killing Sidney Harrow?”

“Possibly. Was it your husband who took the gun in 1954?”

“Yes, it was.” She spoke with her head down and her face averted, like a woman in a storm. “I didn’t want to tell Father that Eldon had come back, or that I had seen him. So I made up a lie about a burglary.”

“Why did you have to tell your father anything?”

“Because he asked me for the gun the very next morning. I believe he’d heard that Eldon had been in town, and he intended to shoot him with the gun. But Eldon already had it. That’s quite an irony, isn’t it?”

It wasn’t the kind I could live on, but I agreed. “How did Eldon get hold of the revolver? You didn’t give it to him?”

“No. I wouldn’t do that. I kept it at the back of the telephone drawer.” Her eyes moved past me to the telephone table. “I got it out when Eldon tapped on the door. I suspected it was Eldon, his knock was so distinctive. Shave and a haircut, two-bits, you know? That was Eldon’s speed. He was capable of coming back after spending nine years in Mexico with another girl. After all the other dreadful things he did to me and my family. And expect to smile it all away and charm us as he used to in the old days.”

She looked at the door. “I didn’t have the chain on the door at that time – I had it put on the following day. The door wasn’t locked, and Eldon came in smiling, calling my name. I wanted to shoot him, but I couldn’t pull the trigger of the gun. He walked right up and took it away from me.”

Mrs. Swain sat down as if her strength had been taken away. She leaned back against the Oriental rug. I sat down beside her tentatively.

“What happened then?”

“Just what you’d expect of Eldon. He denied everything. He hadn’t taken the money. He hadn’t gone to Mexico with the girl. He ran away because he’d been falsely accused, and had been living in strictest celibacy. He even argued that my family owed him something, because father publicly called him an embezzler and blackened his reputation.”

“What was your husband supposed to have done?”

“There’s no supposition about it. He was the cashier of my father’s bank, and he embezzled over half a million dollars. You mean Father didn’t tell you?”

“No, he didn’t. When did all this happen?”

“July the first, 1945 – the blackest day of my life. He ruined my father’s bank and sold me into slavery.”

“I don’t quite follow, Mrs. Swain.”

“Don’t you?” She tapped her knee with her fist like a judge gaveling for order. “In the spring of 1945 I lived in a big house in San Marino. Before the summer was over, I had to move in here. Jean and I could have gone to live with Father on Locust Street, but I wouldn’t live in the same house with Mrs. Shepherd. That meant I had to get out and find a job. The only thing I ever learned to do well is sew. For over twenty years now I’ve been demonstrating sewing machines. That’s what I mean by slavery.” Her fist clenched on her knee. “Eldon robbed me of all the good things of life, and then tried to deny it to my face.”

“I’m sorry.”

“So am I. I’m sorry I didn’t shoot him. If I had another chance–” She took a deep breath and let it out in a sigh.

“It wouldn’t do any good, Mrs. Swain. And there are worse places than this. One of them is the women’s prison at Corona.”

“I know that. I was just talking.” But she leaned toward me intently. “Tell me, has Eldon been seen in Pacific Point?”

“I don’t know.”

“The reason I ask, Jean claims she found some trace of him. It’s why she employed that Harrow person.”

“Did you know Harrow?”

“Jean brought him here last week. I didn’t think much of him. But Jean was always impulsive about men. Now you tell me that he’s dead.”

“Yes.”

“Shot with the revolver that Eldon took from me,” she said dramatically. “Eldon would kill if he had to, you know. He’d kill anyone who tried to drag him back here and put him in jail.”

“That wasn’t what Jean planned to do, though.”

“I know that. She idolized his memory, foolishly. But Sidney Harrow may have had other ideas. Harrow looked like a bum to me. And don’t forget Eldon has stacks of money – over half-a-million.”

“Provided he hung on to it.”

She smiled fiercely. “You don’t know Eldon. He wouldn’t throw money away. Money was all he ever wanted in life. He went about getting it coldly and methodically. The bank examiners said that he’d been preparing his theft for well over a year. And when he got to Mexico he probably invested the whole thing at ten per cent.”

I listened to her, without entirely believing her. According to her own story, she hadn’t seen her husband since 1954. Her account of him had the swooping certainty of a mind tracking on fantasy. A woman could do a lot of dreaming in twenty years of demonstrating sewing machines.

“Are you still married to him, Mrs. Swain?”

“Yes, I am. He may have gotten a Mexican divorce but if he did I never heard of it. He’s still living in sin with that Shepherd girl. Which is the way I want it.”

“You’re talking about Mrs. Shepherd’s daughter?”

“That’s right. Like mother like daughter. I allowed Rita Shepherd into my home and treated her like my own daughter. So she stole my husband.”

“Which theft came first?”

She was puzzled for a moment. Then her brow cleared. “I see what you mean. Yes, Eldon was carrying on with Rita before he stole the money. I caught on to them very early in the game. It was during a swimming party at our house – we had a forty-foot pool where we lived in San Marino.” Her voice sank almost out of hearing. “I can’t bear to think about it.”

The woman had been punished severely in the past hour, and I was weary of my part in it. I rose to go, and thanked her. But she wouldn’t let me leave.

She got up heavily. “Do detectives ever do things on a contingency basis?”

“What do you have in mind?”

“I don’t have the money to pay you. But if I could get back some of the money Eldon took–” Her sentence dangled in the air, hopefully, hopelessly. “We’d all be rich again,” she said in a hushed and prayerful voice. “And of course I’d pay you very generously.”

“I’m sure you would.” I edged toward the door. “I’ll keep my eyes open for your husband.”

“Do you know what he looks like?”

“No.”

“Wait. I’ll get a picture of him, if my daughter left me any.”

She went into a back room where I could hear her lifting and shoving things around. When she came back she had a dusty photograph in her hand and a smear of grime on her cheek, like a miner. “Jean took all my good family pictures, all my San Marino albums,” she complained. “She used to sit and study them the way other young women read movie magazines. George tells me – George is her husband – that she’s still watching the home movies we took in San Marino.”

I took the photograph from her: a man of thirty-five or so, fair-haired, bold-eyed. He looked like the man whose picture Captain Lackland had found on Sidney Harrow. But the photograph wasn’t clear enough to be absolutely certain.